A Crash Course in Enchanting and Interdimensional Mechanics
by inwardtransience
Summary: Through the Veil of Death, Ellie Potter had expected to find...well, death. She's had quite enough of quirky, manipulative old school headmasters and fated destinies, thank you very much. Oh well, at least the girls are cute.
1. 1

Ellie knocked on the door of her head of house's office at exactly the appropriate time, and settled in to wait. Not that she had long to wait — she'd hardly been standing there for two seconds before a call of, 'Come in, Miss Potter,' came from the other side. She opened the door and stepped inside, closing it softly again behind her.

Of the two offices Severus kept this was the nicer one, the one he used when he _didn't_ want to intimidate or creep out the person he was meeting with. So it was mostly only Slytherins or parents of Slytherins who ever saw the inside, honestly. Dark-but-warm red-tinted woods, comfortable arm chairs, a low fire crackling moodily, bookshelves stacked to bursting with titles in various languages. Not a bad place.

Making her way to the chairs in front of the desk, she glanced to the side with no little curiosity. What the hell was Umbridge doing here? By the slight tension in how Severus was sitting behind his desk, she knew the woman hadn't been invited. The Ministry stooge had shown a bit of interest in her toward the beginning of the year, sure — rather hostile interest. But as Ellie had continued to treat her with nothing more than respectful indifference, hardly reacting to her incessant insults and threats against the Headmaster, she'd quickly gone back to treating her as any other student. Almost better than the average student, to be honest: when, after hitting herself with a calming charm, Ellie had asked her to stop calling Maïa a mudblood, she'd apologised and never said it again. It was bloody weird. Of course, she was mostly nice to Slytherins from Noble Houses, and it was hardly like Ellie was her _favourite_ student, but it was still _weird_.

She could only assume Umbridge had assumed she'd be standing with the Headmaster in his stubborn little temper tantrum against the Ministry. The woman _obviously_ hadn't done her research.

She'd even been invited to join that idiotic Inquisitorial Squad of hers. Begged off with the excuse she had revising to do for the OWLs — honestly, she didn't understand how people could need to revise for exams — which Umbridge had accepted with as much grace as the woman seemed capable of. Had no idea what Umbridge was trying to do with that nonsense, but honestly she couldn't figure out the point of this little tyranny going on here, and she'd just stopped caring a while ago. Really just ignoring it by now.

After a muttering of 'Professor' with a nod at each Severus and Umbridge, she slung her bag over the back of a chair, and settled in. Oh, right, not just here with Severus. She sighed in her head, careful not to make any actual noise with it, and crossed her legs and sat up all proper and shite. Ergh, stupid bitch.

She knew from the way Severus was watching her that he knew how uncomfortable she was, and was amused by it. She couldn't say exactly _how_ she knew that — it didn't show on his face or nothing — but she knew. His voice conspicuously flat, he said, 'On time yet again, Miss Potter. Continue being so punctual and I may actually grow to expect it of you.' Not addressing Umbridge's presence, then. All right.

Only long practice kept her from rolling her eyes. 'Daphne can be very distracting. I guess I've just gotten better at ignoring her when I have to be somewhere.'

She wasn't looking that direction, but she still didn't miss Umbridge shifting in her seat somewhat. She knew from occasional hints Umbridge dropped that she didn't approve of such things, but the woman hadn't said a word against their relationship specifically, so Ellie had remained tactfully silent herself. No point opening what she knew would be an annoying argument, after all.

By the tightness around his lips as his eyes flicked for only an instant in Umbridge's direction, Severus hadn't missed it either. Oh, don't let _him_ start it... 'On to business, then.' Severus pulled a parchment folder from seemingly nowhere, flipped it open on his desk. 'Since a few months into second year, your marks have been consistently excellent.' She fought not to look sheepish — she hadn't exactly applied herself in class at first, bad habit from her time at the Dursleys, but she'd quickly turned around when Severus had called her into this very office early in second year to verbally eviscerate her for it. Being yelled at by a dark sorcerer can be quite motivating. 'I would be astounded if you did not do well enough in all your OWLs to advance into sixth-year classes in whatever subject you like.'

He continued without leaving any sort of pause for her to respond — not that she'd especially been planning to. 'However, taking everything would be a waste of time. It would make sense to streamline your efforts. Last we discussed the topic, you had no particular thoughts of what you would like to do after Hogwarts, but that was some time ago. Have you had any ideas since?'

'Well...' She glanced at Umbridge again quick. She wasn't sure if saying this in front of Umbridge was a _great_ idea, but, come to think of it, she didn't see how there was anything serious Umbridge could do with the information. Even assuming she would if she could, which Ellie would give even odds. Still not sure how to predict Umbridge half the time. 'I have had some thoughts, actually.' Severus raised an eyebrow slightly. 'Well, I'll be taking my family's seat in the Wizengamot eventually, of course, but I don't think doing it right away is a good idea. By that point I doubt I'd have the experience and knowledge necessary to make a good showing of myself.'

'That is probably an accurate assumption.'

'Right.' She shrugged a little, glanced at Umbridge again. 'You know I've been playing around with enchanting in my free time.'

Umbridge spoke for the first time, her habitually girlish voice somewhat reproachful. 'You are aware unlicensed enchanting is unlawful?'

Severus turned to give her an unimpressed sort of look. 'If she were selling enchanted objects to other people without a license, you would be correct. Conducting experiments in private or enchanting devices for her own use, so long as she breaks no other laws, are both permitted under regulations as they currently stand.' His eyes flicked back to Ellie. 'I assume you haven't been selling anything you've enchanted.' It wasn't really a question.

She still had to think about that for a split second. 'No, I haven't.' It only counted as a sale if she accepted anything in exchange — she was pretty sure giving away custom enchanted objects for free was still perfectly fine, even without a license. Not that she would have admitted to anything illegal in front of Umbridge in any case, but the easy hesitation as she thought about it looked good anyway.

'I didn't mean to accuse you, Miss Potter,' Umbridge said, the reproachfulness replaced with an extra dose of sugariness. 'I was simply hoping to ensure you were aware of legalities involved in such things. We wouldn't want to give anyone the wrong idea, would we?'

A part of her was reluctant to believe Umbridge, but that _would_ be a reasonable thing for someone without ulterior motives to do. So she just nodded.

Severus nudged them back on topic. 'So, you've been considering studying to be an enchantress, then.'

'Artificer, actually.'

Head tilting slightly, the barest look of surprise crossed Severus's face. Not too unusual, she guessed — it is a somewhat rarer and more difficult qualification. Not by a _lot_ , but somewhat. 'Well.' He glanced down at the folder in front of him again. 'If I remember correctly, most master artificers will only accept candidates with advanced background in Charms and Runes, of course, but also Arithmancy and almost always Transfiguration. Most do not require Defence, but they certainly wouldn't look unkindly on it, and any Dark Arts licensure you end up with in the next couple years can only help you.'

Umbridge shifted in her chair slightly again at the reminder that Ellie was in a Dark Arts apprenticeship under Severus at the moment, but she didn't say anything.

'All of those,' Severus said, continuing as though he hadn't noticed, 'I would be surprised to see anything but an O. Your marks in Transfiguration are the weakest of the five, but I would be absolutely _shocked_ if you don't at least get an E, which is all you really need. So far as other classes go, there would be little point to continuing your studies in History, Herbology, or Astronomy. If you're still revising for any of those three at this late date, I would suggest you simply not bother.'

It was entirely impossible to not smile a little at that.

'As far as Potions goes, that is your choice. It is not your best class—' He only sounded slightly bitter. '—but your work is good enough to earn an O in the OWL. There are a few artificers who also have advanced knowledge of alchemy. Some of the best, in fact. However, that is a lot of work — that would involve all the educational background and qualifications of an enchanter, a spellcrafter, _and_ an alchemist, so it is not a path commonly taken. I would suggest finishing the NEWT Potions course, then decide at a later date if studying alchemy appeals to you. It would be easier to get your NEWT now than to have to go back to intermediate potions should you develop an interest in alchemy later in life.

'So,' he said, flipping the folder closed, 'that is my recommendation. Charms, Runes, Arithmancy, Transfiguration, Defence, Potions. I don't foresee you having any problems in any of those six, but you may like to prioritise Transfiguration and Arithmancy just in case. In the latter half of your seventh year, we can discuss how you should go about pursuing the masteries and licensures necessary, but I don't expect any problems there.' He added, a tinge of humour on his voice, 'There are advantages to fame, after all.'

It was entirely impossible to not roll her eyes at that.

Within a couple minutes she was leaving the room. She checked the time quick, decided the girls would probably still be in the library, so started that way. Somewhat to her surprise, she wasn't even out of the dungeons yet when she caught up with Umbridge, who had left some minutes ahead of Ellie. She was standing off to the side of the hallway, shuffling through that stupid bag of hers, as riotously pink as everything else. God, she dressed like such a psychopath. Ellie watched her for a moment before shrugging it off. It was weird Umbridge was still down here, but whatever. She passed Umbridge to continue on down the hall.

She barely even felt the curse coming.

* * *

The world snapped back into existence around her with the familiar adrenaline rush of a revival charm, and Ellie immediately set to berating herself. Cursed in the back with hardly noticing. Severus would be so disappointed. And Marlene, she would _never_ let her forget it. God, so embarrassing...

'Wakey, wakey, Missy Potty.'

Fuck. She let out a long sigh, rubbing at her suddenly aching head. Even though she'd never met the woman the sickly, sing-song voice belonged to, she'd heard enough descriptions of her she could make a very confident guess. 'A second, please, Cousin. Revival charms give me a headache.'

Ellie stretched out as well as she could with her newfound magical sense, trying to pick apart her surroundings, how many people she was dealing with. It wasn't just Lestrange. One Death Eater, two Death Eater, three Death Eater... Eight? It felt like eight. Fuck. She couldn't tell where they were though. _Everything_ was magic, the floors and tall, spindly wooden shelves around her so thoroughly enchanted they were easily detectable, but so thick she couldn't even start at a guess of exactly what was in them. Too complicated.

She did pick out her wand, thank god, and a collection of small, dormant enchantments she knew were some of her practice constructs — yes, she does carry them with her at all times, she's aware that's a bit paranoid. At least her wand was _here_ , in her bag, but her bag was obviously being carried by one of the Death Eaters. That was a problem.

There was a pretty simple way to fix that problem, but it might get a bit tricky pulling it off. She'd have to stall anyway. She knew the Order would be able to find her eventually, but she'd need to stay alive long enough for the hypocrite brigade to show up.

But anyway, Lestrange was cackling, the sound sharp and dripping with blood and madness, echoing in a way that told Ellie that wherever she was was a rather large place. ' _Oooh_ , so _polite_ , little Miss Potter. I'm surprised. I wouldn't think my blood-traitor of a—'

'As much as I enjoy watching you play with your food, Bellatrix, we do have a job to do here. Get up, girl.'

It took some effort to ease the tension from her own jaw, stop herself from grinding her teeth — that smooth, cold voice was all too identifiable as Lucius Malfoy. Just perfect. Being in this fuckhead's presence was bad enough when she could imagine cursing him _in the face_ , did not feel like dealing with him without her wand. She sat up on the hard, stone floor, opened her eyes to look around. Eig–no, nine Death Eaters, in the familiar solid black hoods and solid white masks. So very perfect. Ellie took a moment to pick out the one carrying her bag before looking past them. They were surrounded by rows and rows of shelves, one after another after another disappearing into the distance in all directions, including above their heads, seeming almost like a cavernous library, all lit by soft blue-white light emanating from—

Oh... _fuck_. She knew where this was. Ellie hadn't actually been here, but Severus had once described it, the same conversation he'd told her about that bloody stupid prophecy. They were in the Department of Mysteries. At a guess, the Death Eaters wanted her to retrieve that copy of the prophecy for them. It seemed things weren't going to stop being perfect any time soon here.

It'd really be nice if the Order would hurry up and get here already.

Tch. Might as well play along. Ellie obediently got up to her feet, trying to make the motion as casual and careless as possible. By the slight tensing she noticed in the posture of two of the Death Eaters around her she'd successfully annoyed them. Ha ha, _good_. Wait, no, er. Maybe it _wasn't_ such a good idea to piss off the dark magic -using terrorists while she was unarmed and outnumbered nine to one. Yeah, that might be a stupid thing to do.

But, oh well. It'd be far more fun. This was only going to end one way no matter what, might as well enjoy herself along the way.

Before anyone got back to giving orders, Ellie took a moment to reach down into herself, a thing she never could quite explain, stretching for the wellspring of fire and light deep within. Good, she could still touch it, they hadn't slipped her a dampening potion or anything while she was out. Which was really a bit stupid of them. Well, okay, to be completely fair, they probably didn't know she'd been working on wandless magic lately, but they should have guessed it. She meant, they did know who her mother was — Lily Evans had been famous for her skill with wandless magic long before she'd been known for any other reason, self-taught even _before_ starting at Hogwarts. Not that she'd be pointing out their mistake for them, of course, sounded like their problem. She drew her power up, not forcing it out to attempt to cast any sort of spell, just leaving it to sit just under her skin, ready to be used at the slightest cue.

Filling herself with magic like this tends to feel a bit odd, a vibrating tingling sensation running across her entire body, an impression of airy lightness, like she needn't walk across the ground, she can just float around if she wants. Well, actually, she _can_ just float around if she wants, she's done that. Kinda tiring, though. But, not that she minded. Really, she was mostly just glad she'd managed to cut off normal feelings, filling her head with warm giddiness and giggling song, before she'd really started getting scared.

Honestly, she uses the same trick to keep herself from getting too angry with people quite a lot. Is that bad? Really sounds like the sort of thing she shouldn't be doing...

'This way, Miss Potter,' Malfoy said, gesturing her toward where he stood just off a shelf. 'There's something here you'll be getting for us.'

Ellie glanced around quick, then shrugged in her head. Playing along was still the best idea. She'd be needing a distraction to swipe her bag successfully, hopefully she could hold out long enough for the Order to show up and provide it. That blood tracker Dumbledore thought she didn't know about could detect her here, right? Warding against blood-based tracking charms was nearly impossible. With how empty it felt here, it was probably after hours, the Order should have had plenty of time to get going. Yeah, shouldn't take them long at all. So she calmly walked over to the shelf, glancing at the ball of spun glass just in front of Malfoy, entirely unsurprised to see the label under it. 'Tom finally making a serious effort to get this thing, huh?'

A piercing shriek of rage, contorted into, 'You _dare_ speak his—!'

' _Calm_ , Bellatrix.'

The urge to shake her head was too strong to hold it in — she had absolutely no idea how he could possibly tolerate followers who were just plain fucking insane. Seemed like more trouble than they were worth, really. 'Why doesn't he just come in here and get it himself? That's the thing I don't get. I wouldn't think the wards here would be up to the challenge of keeping out a sorcerer like him.'

'It is not for you to know the Dark Lord's motives,' Malfoy said in a frigid drawl. So, he had no clue either. All right then. 'You will simply obey.'

Ellie turned away from the prophecy to meet Malfoy's eyes through the slits in his mask. Ah, less fun to imagine cursing him in the face if she couldn't actually see his face. Or, she wondered, if she hit him with a blood-boiling curse, would steam trickle out of the eye holes? Hmm. Forcing her voice light and casual, the imagined sound of Malfoy's choking screams joining the song of magic in her head, she said, 'No, I don't think I will.'

'That would not be wise, Miss Potter.'

Crossing her arms over her chest, she let out a sniff. 'I'm not the only person around displaying a lack of wisdom. If your Lord wants my cooperation, he's going about it all wrong. I wouldn't be opposed to giving him this prophecy on the face of it — I mean it, Lord Malfoy,' Ellie added when his eyes narrowed with clear disbelief. 'I don't particularly care one way or the other.' Of course, that was mostly just because Tom would likely come after her no matter what, and it wasn't like there was anything in there that would help him anyway. Whether the idiot got the prophecy or not made exactly zero difference. 'I would have given it to him freely if he _asked_.

'That's the mistake your Lord has made over and over, you see,' she said, her tone conversational. Not hard to do, really, with her mood buoyed by the magic crackling just under her skin. Okay, slightly difficult to keep her voice level, stop herself from slipping into a slight sing-song tone she just knew would piss them off a bit too much, but she managed. 'He keeps trying to _force_ me to do what he wants. Back when we met in first year, he abducted me and dragged me down to wake me up in front of that _stupid_ mirror, then when the—' fake '—philosopher's stone appeared in my pocket moved to kill me and take it from my corpse.' Arsehole had swiped her out of my bed and everything, one hell of a wakeup call. 'I would have just _given_ it to him — it's not like it meant anything to me, didn't even know what the bloody thing _was_ at the time—' Would have let him have it even if she had, there's _no such thing as a fucking philosopher's stone_. '—there was absolutely _no reason_ to kill me for it. And if he'd just been a bit more civilised he'd have been resurrected three years earlier, and would be immortal and drowning in gold to boot.' Except not, because _the whole thing was fake_ , fucking idiot, she still couldn't get over this. 'Speaking of resurrections, if he'd wanted my blood for that purpose so badly he could have _just. Asked._ '

There was a snort of derision from behind her. 'You expect us to believe you would just hand your blood over to the Dark Lord to use in a ritual?'

Hello again, Master Jugson. ' _That_ ritual?' She shrugged. 'Sure, why not? Especially since using my blood like that gives me a layer of protection — since _my_ blood runs in _his_ veins, any spell cast on _either_ of us that can be carried through blood will affect _both_ of us.' She could practically feel the shock thick in the air around her, and Ellie couldn't help smirking a little. 'Didn't think of that, did you? That's really rather sad. It's only the founding principle of all blood magic.'

'I doubt Dumbledore would have dirtied his precious _saviour_ by teaching her any blood magic.'

She glanced quick over her shoulder, frowning a little. Whose voice was that? She didn't think she knew this one. Probably one of the Azkaban escapees, then — she'd met all the free Death Eaters at one point or another the last few years, or all the big names at least. 'Well, you'd be right that Dumbledore hasn't taught me any blood magic. Of course, he hasn't taught me _anything else_ either, so that doesn't exactly mean anything.' A flare of legitimate annoyance pierced the giddiness enveloping her, she didn't even have to fake the derisive snort. 'It baffles me how everyone seems to assume Dumbledore and I have any kind of relationship at all. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've had a conversation with him, and I haven't exactly enjoyed any of them. I rather hate the man, in fact. He's had far too much power over my life thus far, and I don't like it.'

Honestly? She had long been completely tired of Dumbledore's shite. She meant, she hadn't liked him from the very first time she'd met him — she's far from the first Slytherin ever to find his whole eccentric old man act grating, she hated trying to talk to him so fucking much — but he'd done absolutely nothing to change her mind since. The way he insisted on chewing on his foot and trying (and failing) to manipulate her into stupid shite, there was precious little chance of that changing. If it weren't practically guaranteed Tom would come after her anyway, or other people she cared about, she'd have already stepped back to enjoy the show as Dumbledore failed to clean up _his own bloody mess_.

But, anyway, she was in the middle of a villainous monologue here. Well, not technically a _villainous_ monologue. She guessed from their perspective? Whatever. Melodramatically stalling, anyway. Sort of surprised they were letting her get away with it. 'I don't like being forced, you see. I would have just given Tom this prophecy if he'd asked. But, now that he's tried to _force_ me to get it for him, I'm rather inclined to refuse just on principle. Which Tom really should have realised was a possibility — I bet he'd do the same in my shoes.'

'You think yourself and the Dark Lord so similar? Others have been killed for lesser presumptions.' Malfoy's voice was low and dangerous when he said it, the implied threat clear.

Ellie rolled her eyes at Malfoy, entirely just because she knew how completely his attempt to intimidate her had failed would annoy him. Tee hee. 'Sorcerers born to Noble Houses, but abandoned to be raised in poverty and neglect by muggles who hated us, and once we got to Hogwarts had to deal with the hot-cold nonsense that comes with being both a Parselmouth and a halfblood in Slytherin.' She shook her head to herself. 'No, we have _nothing_ in common, not at all.'

'You filthy little _bitch_ , how _dare_ you—'

'What, did he not tell you?' She glanced over her shoulder, meeting the half-hidden, twitching eyes of her second cousin — it was the messy black hair and visible shaking that gave away which she was. And, were these idiots really going to let her keep talking like this? What's up with that? She meant, it's convenient, don't get her wrong, she just didn't get it. 'Mum was a Gaunt, dad was a muggle. You second-generation slaves should ask your parents, they went to school with him. They'll know your Lord is a halfblood. Or has he actually been telling you he's a pureblood? Cheeky bastard — and I do mean that literally.' Even though they're nowhere around, Ellie could still hear Luna giggle and Daphne groan.

Malfoy let out an aggravated sigh. 'This is a waste of time.' By the time she had turned back around to face him, it was already too late.

Not that it particularly mattered. It was an _imperitāns_ , obviously, she recognised the warm, smooth, seductive feel of the magic. But it couldn't even settle over her properly. The magic she had still waiting just under her skin slowed it down somewhat, but Ellie already had a peculiar resistance to mental magic she'd never quite understood. Legilimens found reading her mind peculiarly difficult, mind-altering charms of all sorts had to be ridiculously overpowered to get the proper effect. Turns out she's even virtually immune to most love potions — that incident led to almost dizzying relief for her and a lifetime of nightmares for Jugson. Not this Jugson, of course, his son, graduated last year. And, after a bit of practice courtesy of Barty Junior, she can shrug off an _imperitāns_ like it's not even there. She considered a moment whether she should play along, pretend the charm was actually working, to maybe buy a little time.

But Malfoy would probably just make her grab the prophecy right away anyway, so that was pointless. Oh well. With a sharp thought, Ellie shattered the spell still futilely attempting to enthrall her, tendrils of magic dissipating to nothing in the air. She shot Malfoy a cold glare, going as Severus with it as she could possibly manage. ' _Seriously_? Was that sad excuse for an _imperitāns_ the best you can do? _Really_? I barely even felt that. Pathetic.'

Fury clear on his voice, Malfoy snarled, 'Taunting me isn't the best idea, Potter. Do you have any idea who you're dealing with?'

'Do _you_?' This would probably come back to bite her in the arse later, but why not. She relaxed — not a muscle, not anything physical. It was hard to explain. The tense wall of self holding her magic back eased somewhat, allowing tendrils of thick energy to slip out into the air, grasping blindly at the shelves, the Death Eaters around her. This was the mark of a sorcerer, a constant upwelling of magic, unconsciously channelled through their bodies with natural ease. It had started happening to her last fall, it'd taken her a few days with Severus to learn how to stop it, to hold the magic in. Most mages are sensitive enough to detect it, and whether they are or not it tends to make them uncomfortable, growing terrified, anxious, hyperactive, or aroused, depending on exactly how they feel about the sorcerer or sorceress in question...except Luna, for some reason. It just makes her smile and hum to herself, but she's _Luna Lovegood_ , Ellie expects weird by this point. Generally uncomfortable, anyway. Which was exactly what she was going for this time — she couldn't help a smirk at the muttering and shuffling behind her, the sudden shocked tension in Malfoy's shoulders. 'Do you _really_?'

For a moment, there was no response. Then, sounding oddly resigned, Malfoy said, 'You're not going to make me use Travers, are you?'

Oh. Shite. Travers was here. Dammit. A number of Death Eaters had made a particular name for themselves from their cruelty, but Travers had earned quite a degree of infamy for brutally raping younger women and girls. No, thanks, they would not be doing that tonight. Ellie realised, even as her accelerating heart started lifting up into her throat, the song of magic in her head turning sharp and eager, that it looked like it was time to make her own distraction. 'Ergh, you Death Eaters are _disgusting_.' But she moved to the proper shelf anyway, lifting a hand up to the proper prophecy sphere. She touched a single finger to it, feeling the deadly enchantment binding the glass to the shelf rapidly unspool. But she didn't pick it up. Instead, she let her hand fall to the wood just beneath and in front—

She drew the light within up and into her grasp, moulded it with gentle tendrils of thought into the shape she needed, pushed the charm down her arm, her skin tingling as it moved, and into her wrist, her joints burning with it.

—forced into the shelf the most powerful banishing charm she could manage wandlessly. And, this being _her_ , that meant rather fucking powerful. The wood cracked and splintered, the prophecy shooting off through the gap between shelves, the entire structure teetering dangerously. 'Fetch.' With a now-familiar flex of will and magic, she called up shadows, and stepped into icy blackness.

She travelled in total darkness for an infinite instant before the world faded back into existence, the shadow magic trick Severus had taught her depositing her behind the row opposite the one she'd broken. She quick reached for the light again, twisted it into the shape of a silencing charm, one of the earliest she'd taught herself to cast wandlessly, and draped the thing over her whole body. She stepped into shadows again, going another row over, then another, then slipping over to the end of the row. Ninety-four the way she'd come, ninety-three the opposite — the door had to be this way. Alright, then.

The shouting and cursing and occasional sounds of wood and glass shattering was coming closer — these idiots had the subtly of a herd of stampeding rhinoceroses (rhinocera?) — so Ellie again stepped into shadows, this time appearing some metres above the floor. This really was a high-ceilinged room here, how convenient. With ease of practice, with hardly even a thought, she tossed aside her human shell, let her body bubble and shrink, the sensation rather like sinking into a bath filled with warm water, and took up her animal shell instead. Which was just convenient. Not only could she watch from above much easier, not only would her red-on-black colouring make her almost impossible to spot, not only would the silencing charm she'd cast a moment ago cover all sound from her wings, but falcons had far keener eyesight than did humans — the blue light did shift shade slightly, the shadows did seem somewhat deeper, but it was child's play to keep an eye on all of them, their forms easily trackable even with shelves and orbs flicking by between them.

Gliding with slow, light strokes, slipping from one high shelf to another, she trailed the Death Eaters searching for her. She'd spotted the one carrying her bag immediately, but she needed to wait until there wasn't anyone else behind him. Come on, come on, she didn't have all day. These idiots were getting increasingly agitated, judging by how much more frequently they were simply blowing shelves up, she didn't have time to—

There it was. Ellie changed again in mid air, swapping her falcon shell for the human, then immediately fell into shadows. She appeared almost instantly behind the Death Eater carrying her bag, grabbed the soft cloth with both hands, then vanished into shadows before anyone could react. Yes! That had gone perfectly, and now she had all her things!

And, she noticed as she appeared again, the Death Eater's robe. Er. Whoops? Hadn't meant to do that, but shadow magic could be finicky...

Letting the robe fall to the ground, she slung the bag over her shoulder, and prepared to— 'There she is!' Without thinking, she jumped right back into nothingness, appearing a row over and a few metres above the floor, again slipping into her avian form. It was common knowledge that magic couldn't be cast by an animagus when in their animal form. That was, she'd discovered right away, not strictly true. Magic couldn't be cast _with a wand_ , but anything the animagus could do wandlessly was fair game.

Since she could walk through shadows, she was basically an enormous cheater.

But, unfortunately, she couldn't just pop through shadows straight back to Hogwarts. The Ministry, she'd been told, had wards blocking it. She could _theoretically_ go right to the wardline, step across, and _then_ go straight to Hogwarts, but she'd never actually been to the Ministry before, so she had no idea where the wardline was. So she had to do this the slow way. She slipped silently through the air, skipping a dozen metres forward at a time with each dip into shadows, working her way further from her pursuers. Before long, the air behind and below her was screaming and shuddering, pressure waves erupting again and again from powerful area-effect magic. And slowly closing in.

She'd just have to do something about that.

Ellie tipped down a little, alighting on top of one narrow shelf, instantly switching back to her human form — the shelf teetered slightly, but it stayed upright. She snatched her wand out of her bag, didn't hesitate a second before starting the incantation. ' _Austre furēns, terram—_ ' She drew out the moment only slightly, savouring the feeling of hot power flowing through her, so intense her body vibrated with it, her entire right arm seared, a light giddiness in her head powerful enough she couldn't help but smile. She _loved_ casting big magic. '— _inundā_.' An unpleasant shiver ran through her as the spell left, but it didn't strip her of her grin.

She loved this spell. With a heavy crack, a bolt of blue-white lightning shot from the tip of her wand, striking halfway down the shelf in front of her the next instant, the bolt splitting on contact, dividing into three, into nine, into twenty-seven, into eighty-one, and then hundreds, and then more hundreds, and then thousands, and then _more_. The shelf in front of her was consumed with a writhing, crackling sheath of sharp blue-white, prophecy orbs popping under the onslaught with little _poof_ noises, the wood catching alight at a single touch. The lightning spread down to the ground, then across, dividing again and again and again as it spread, reaching one row of shelves, then another, expanding in an inexorable wave. If anything, the enchantments in shelves and floor only seemed to energise the magic further, pushing it faster and larger than she was used to, the bolts of lightning as thick as her wrist filling the air with the screaming and snapping of electricity so loud it was almost giving her a headache.

Huh. Looked like she was making a bit of a mess. Not that she really cared. In fact, she couldn't help but grin. She'd bet a thousand galleons the Death Eaters hadn't expect that. Fucking idiots.

Ellie yanked herself into her falcon guise and again took flight, flitting from shelf to shelf, skipping through shadows again and again instead of flying around or over them. She passed a couple doors out, then decided an instant too late she wanted to take that one, warm orange light flooding through the open doorway. She doubled back through shadows quick, smoothly banked in a graceful turn right through the center of—

In an instant, Ellie's skin turned to fire, her bones turned to glass, and she let out a high scream that tore at her suddenly human-shaped throat as she tumbled to the granite floor, her bag sliding away from her. But it only lasted a moment, the pain quickly vanishing, leaving her breathless on the floor. Okay. _Ow_. Apparently they had wards against animagi worked into the doorframes. Would _not_ be trying that again. She grabbed her bag, quickly summoning a few blasting discs with a gesture from her wand. She activated them all at once with another charm, scattered them just inside the doorway. The Death Eaters had probably heard her screaming, and her short incapacitation had given them far too much time to catch up. Hopefully, one would lose a leg to one of those.

Somewhat shaky, Ellie pushed herself to her feet, and started stumbling through... What the hell was _this_ place? Why did they have a big bloody aquarium filled with _brains_? You know what, she didn't want to know. She walked off toward the door directly opposite, her unsteady steps growing gradually more confident as she went. She threw the door open, and recognised the dark, rounded room with a dozen blue torches and wooden doors from Severus's description as the entrance, which was good. She also recognised the five figures standing inside as more Death Eaters, which was bad.

Did managing her really rate fourteen Death Eaters? Huh. The thought left her strangely pleased.

Before they could react, she took aim and snarled out, ' _Rḗtte_!' The air again filled with a crackling of electricity as a flickering shaft of purple-white brilliance leapt from her wand at the Death Eaters. She turned before the elemental magic hit, meaning to go back the way she'd come, but stuttered to a halt when she heard a _second_ explosion at the same time as the first, screaming rending the air in both directions. Laid out on the ground just inside the doorway on the opposite side of the room with the creepy tentacle brains was one of the Death Eaters from the Hall of Prophecy, clutching his mauled leg, blood already pooling thick on the ground. And behind him, staring in shock, were a few more. But not staring for long. Lestrange snapped off a nasty-looking blasting curse even as the Death Eaters in this room gathered themselves behind her.

Ellie ducked to the side, scrambling for the door one over, a smirk crossing her face as Lestrange's curse hit one of the Death Eaters, setting him screaming. Idiot. She threw the door open, stepped through it even as she cast over her shoulder, throwing as much power into it as she could spare at the moment. ' _Pugiūmbrae ningite._ ' Teetering slightly with the draw of the powerful dark elemental magic, she didn't bother pausing to watch her charm do its work. She slammed the door closed behind her, taking the barest second to breathe.

But only a second. She cast a quick locking and then sealing charm on the door, then summoned four more discs from her bag, slapped one on either side of the frame, stuck to the wall with built-in sticking charms, then activated them with a wave of her wand. The barrier appeared as a barely-visible, green-blue sheen across the entire surface. They'd be able to get the door open just fine, but then they'd need to beat her enchantment before making their way through. Thinking her idea through in her head, she ran down the narrow hall she'd found herself in — offices, looked like. She opened a door at random, finding a cavernous, dark room filled with glowing stars and floating planets. That would do. She reached inside, placing the other two discs, digging her cloak out of her bag with the other hand, activated the enchantment, then snatched her hand back before the barrier could snap into place. She renewed her silencing charm, flung her father's cloak over her shoulders, and continued down the hall.

And not a moment too soon. She felt the tactile snap of stubborn magics cancelling each other out, and a group of angry Death Eaters came pouring around the little corner in the L-shaped hall. 'There!' one in the front called, pointing at the barrier blocking the weird solar system room off. The Death Eaters tumbled in that direction, another touching his wand to the barrier. Drawing runes, she noticed — she stopped slinking away, craning her head around out of curiosity. The runic spell the Death Eater was carving into the barrier meant literally _sever from the world_. Hmm, clever. With a last flare of power, her barrier winked out, and the Death Eaters filed out of the hall.

Once they were gone, Ellie opened the last door in the hall, slipped inside, and shut it quietly behind her.

The second she saw where she was, and knowing her silencing charm would cover it up anyway, she let out a noisy curse. _Of course_ she just had to end up here. She'd never been here before herself, but she still recognised the old, angular stone benches worked into a squared amphitheatre, at the center the crumbling arch of the Veil of Death. Any of the rooms she could have ended up in and it was this one. Of course.

Ignoring the seductive whispering she heard from the tattered, unnaturally black cloth, Ellie moved around the rim of the room, heading for the next door in line. She tapped her wand against the door, casting a quick charm to look through the wood. It was a possibility the Unspeakables had charmed against it, but they fortunately hadn't — there was that room with the damn creepy brains again. She noticed the Death Eater whose leg she'd blown off was still there, either dead or in stasis. That way _could_ work, but she'd rather open as few doors as possible, just in case. Letting the charm fall, she slipped to the next door, cast the charm again. Hall of Prophecy again.

The next door, the charm showed her the circular entrance chamber, which was good. Evidently, the Death Eaters had managed to end her elemental spell — unsurprising, it wasn't that difficult — but there were still a few shards of oily black ice lying around. As well as what looked like a couple more Death Eater corpses, which was also good. Dumbledore would likely be having words with her for using that spell, but she wasn't apologising. However, the rest of the Death Eaters appeared to have made their way back to this room, which was bad. Even as she watched, one of them twirled his wand in a tight arc she recognised—

She sighed as the magic rose, a warm stickiness clinging to her. A tracking charm. Great. With a few quick flicks of her wand and incantations muttered under her breath, she layered the door and wall with spell-resistant ice three feet thick, then turned to slip deeper into the room, stepping between the benches toward the center. She'd hardly gone a few feet before she came to a sudden halt. She was being targeted by a _second_ tracking charm. This one was a little different though. Instead of coming from _outside_ , the feeling seemed to be coming from _inside_ , warmth flowing through her very blood. She knew what this was.

Ellie let out a smirk. Better late than never.

She shucked off her cloak again, stuffing it back into her bag — it'd only slow her down now. With a swing of her wand, _Saepem glaciālem_ ' _profundam_ ,' a tall wall of shimmering, blue-purple ice appeared between her and the door. She hopped a few more benches down, cast the charm again, creating another layer of spell-resistant ice between herself and the Death Eaters. She repeated the process a couple more times, until she was on the bottom level of the chamber, the Veil to her back.

As the sounds of explosions and tinkling ice filled the air, Ellie gave the Veil a slightly wary glance over her shoulder. That thing was rather creepy, all fluttering around like that despite the stillness of the air, seeming a solid black that would be simply impossible without magic, indistinct whispers wafting off the surface. Perhaps most unnervingly, it didn't _feel_ like anything. In her sense of magic, the gap within the archway was a complete and total dead spot. Even more so than air, an absence of anything so absolute it didn't exist, despite the fact that she could see and hear something there. It was creepy.

But she had something more important to deal with. _Cumfulmine lacerā_. Before the curse could fully leave her wand, she caught it with a quick flourish. Imagining a single line of light splitting into five, she changed one advanced blasting curse into five, then duplicated the five again into twenty-five. She let out a hiss, wincing as tendrils of lightning crawled against skin, her shoulder burning, the bones in her wrist screaming with the force of magic they contained. Okay, maybe she wouldn't be making any more. Twenty-five was good, right? Well, if they were stupid enough not to block or dodge them twenty-five would be plenty to kill all the remaining Death Eaters at once, so she supposed it really was good enough...

Her last barrier of ice was blown apart, and she didn't even wait for the steam to clear before releasing the twenty-five curses in her grasp, the sudden dimming of the light within her forcing her gasping to her knees. The brilliant purple charms shot into the crowd of approaching figures, exploding with flashes of blue and yellow light and a deafening chorus of lightning. She thought a few of them might have been hit, it was hard to tell, but she wasn't going to wait to find out.

Ellie reached again for the weakened light within her, drawing it up and out, coaxing it back to full life. After only a second it was again a brilliant fire roaring within her, filling her with light and life, bringing a wide grin to her face. She popped back to her feet even as curses started to rain down on her. She dodged the first couple that would have actually hit her, then deflected a couple more with neat twitches of her wand, contorting the last into the movement for a piercing curse, mildly disappointed as she watched the Death Eater she'd aimed it at deflect it easily, then conjured and ducked behind a stone barrier when killing curses from three different wands converged on her all at once. Then she stepped through shadows again, moving only a couple metres to reappear with another, ' _Rḗtte_ ,' the brilliant lightning bolt taking one unfortunate Death Eater straight in the chest, before she again had to go on the defensive, deflecting and shielding curses in turn, the ones that couldn't be blocked either dodged or stopped with conjured debris.

 _Where the hell_ _ **are**_ _they?_ she thought as a minor cutting curse slipped by, carving a thin line across her hip. She didn't think she'd be able to hold out against this many people at once for much—

There was a low _boom_ , the explosion so forceful the ground teetered under her, unbalancing her just as she'd been deflecting a bone-shattering curse — she just managed to twist the failed deflection into a barely-adequate shield instead, the thing shattering on contact. Even despite the near miss, she couldn't help her lips twisting into a smirk.

If any of the Death Eaters saw and were wondering what was so funny they didn't have long to worry about it: curses started raining on them from behind only seconds later.

But Ellie wasn't one to lay back and leave it to everyone else. Even as the room descended into chaos, Order and Death Eater skipping back and forth in a dizzying dance of curse and countercurse, Ellie switched from defensive magic to offensive. She sniped at Death Eaters wherever she had a good shot, firing with blasting curses, and severing curses, and piercing curses, anything she could think of that had a narrow field of effect, unlikely to accidentally hit someone on her team, but quite likely to actually do some good. Dumbledore's bootlickers had a nasty habit of not putting people down permanently when they really should. She saw Severus with them, that limp he'd had for near on a year now quite distinctive — Ellie was still trying not to feel too guilty about that — so at least one other person around would be thinking with their head instead of their heart.

'Ellie!' The sharp shout of her name startled her for a second, but she felt the incoming magic she instantly recognised as her godfather's the second before he appeared at her side. Sirius wrapped an arm tight around her shoulders even as he raised a shield with the other, the gleaming, multicoloured barrier bowing under the pressure from a powerful blasting curse. 'Don't you scare me like that _ever again_!'

'Yes, I'll make sure not to get _stunned in the back and abducted_ next time. How silly of me.' Despite the situation they were in, despite the sharp sarcasm on her voice, she was still smiling.

Sirius dropped his shield charm, cast a shockingly powerful piercing curse at the Death Eater who'd just tried to kill them. They managed to dodge in time, but the curse cut a crater in the stands a foot wide and several deep. Damn. Okay, scratch that, maybe there were _two_ others here. He was a Black though, not surprising. 'Let's not let Marlie know you let someone hex you in the back,' he said, chuckling a little under his breath.

Ellie rolled her eyes. Yeah, she'd just be insufferable after that, wouldn't she.

'Was that your work we found in that bloody spinning room?'

'It spins? I mean, yes. _Pugiūmbrae ningentēs_.'

She felt Sirius wince. 'Yeah, let's _not_ let Dumbledore know about that one, either.'

'Probably a good—' Sirius's arm loosened its grip around her a bit, but only to drag her with him to the ground, the two of them barely ducking under two killing curses simultaneously crossing through where they'd been standing a second ago. 'Okay,' she said, pushing herself to her feet again. 'Talk later, kill Death Eaters now.'

'Try to hold back on the dark curses.' Sirius casually deflected a blasting curse headed for his chest, sending it barrelling down just in front of the Veil, carving a gaping fissure into the stone and blowing little chunks of rock everywhere. He fired back with an overpowered cutting curse, the Death Eater narrowly avoiding the arc of blue-purple light. 'Dumbledore always comes complaining to me when you do that.'

With a deft twist of her wand, Ellie conjured a bit of ice encasing the foot and ankle of the Death Eater Sirius had just missed. While the idiot stumbled, Ellie shot off a variant of a piercing curse she knew was all but unblockable. It slipped right through the basic shield charm the Death Eater reflexively cast, carving deep into his chest with a thick splatter of blood. 'Does that one count?'

Sirius just snorted.

That was about when things got weird.

This incident was already an enormous embarrassment. Fourteen Death Eaters, and they hadn't even been able to _catch_ her before reinforcements arrived. She was positive she'd even killed at least one or two, by herself. That was pretty pathetic. Once the Order showed up, there was really no point in them staying. So the Death Eaters were sounding the retreat. Though they had someone making a distraction.

Some time ago, explaining the natural variation in raw power present in mages, Severus had listed off who he believed to be the ten most powerful currently in Britain. He'd given Tom the number one spot, Dumbledore a very close second. Dumbledore still matched or even edged out Tom in a fight due to greater experience, greater theoretical knowledge. He'd rated himself...sixth or seventh? Ellie couldn't remember exactly.

Number three was Bellatrix Lestrange. Were she not so irrationally devoted to Tom, she could be a Dark Lady in her own right. _Easily_.

The air shook as dark magic thrummed across it, filling Ellie with an odd sense of falling, as though the ground were tilting, dropping out from under her. The air around Lestrange, about a third the way around the room from Ellie, turned thick and dark, tendrils of sickening blackness extending out into the air around her, spinning and grasping around the room. Severus had told her about this spell: it was essentially a rotting curse that could be used on an entire room full of people at once, but was designed to pass over anyone Marked with no effect. Very few people were powerful enough to cast it, and it _was_ blockable, so it was usually only used as a distraction, for the most part to cover retreats. She assumed that was why Lestrange was using it now, since she already noticed Death Eaters break away from their opponents, flooding for the exits.

She had no time to pursue them — just because it was blockable didn't mean it was _easily_ blockable. With a flourish, she summoned all the Order members within a dozen metres of her, yanking Sirius, Dora, Vance, and Shacklebolt over to sprawl at her feet. She drew up a sense of defiance within herself, reaching for the most unambiguously defensive feelings she could find, absolutely _refusing_ to let the people under her protection be harmed, the incantation falling over her lips as fast as she could possibly speak it. ' _Lūx-abluēns ad-fidēlēs-tuōs-dēscendās et-hanc-noctem-suffōcantem-ablēgēs!'_

She grit her teeth, squeezing her eyes shut, at the nauseating flare of light magic rising within her, clawing at her chest and her throat. It was so sickening it was making her dizzy, and she was rather glad she'd never made it to dinner, since it lessened the chance she'd vomit all over the place somewhat. Ugh, she hated casting light magic. But despite her stomach, head, and the joints of her wand hand viciously protesting, her magic obeyed her, twisting into a crystalline hemisphere of rainbow light surrounding herself and the four Order members she'd rescued slowly teetering to their feet, the magic singing and dancing on the air around them.

Well, Dora and Shacklebolt probably would have been able to save themselves, they'd just gotten caught in her summoning charm as well. Sirius _might_ have managed it, but she'd almost certainly just saved Vance's life. Maybe she'd stop muttering about her being a rising Dark Lady now. Doubtful, but she could hope.

The tendrils of blackness on the air struck against her shield, one after another, light flaring white-gold with each strike. She'd barely gotten the shield up in time, damn stupid incantation, and now she only stared, squinting to see past the blinding light, the storm of darkness, a few more glowing defenses here and there. Severus was Marked, he was the only one who didn't need to defend himself, she knew he had to be moving in on Lestrange any second—

At the center of the black a hole suddenly opened, reality reasserting itself, as Lestrange dodged a spell of some kind. By the lines scored into the ground a short distance away, probably that dark slicing curse Severus liked so much. Ellie tried not to be too impatient as the tendrils of black slowly dissipated, watching Severus and Lestrange skip back and forth across the room, the air flaring and crashing with curse after curse. She hated having to wait.

There, that would do. She dropped the shield, ducked under the hand Sirius was halfway through putting on her shoulder, probably intending to hold her back. Wouldn't be having any of that. She stepped into shadows, reappearing on the other side of the room. Only to find a torrent of purple and black inches from crashing over her head, her skin already itching from standing so close to such powerful dark magic. Whoops. She disappeared back into shadows before the spell could hit her, barely, appearing again a short distance away.

Damn, Severus and Lestrange were moving so _fast_. They were skipping back and forth across the room, standing in one spot only long enough to shoot off a curse, release a flood of elemental magic, deflect or shield where appropriate, before vanishing again, appearing half across the room, back and forth and all around, a dizzying dance of deadly magic. She thought she'd been getting pretty good by now, but she couldn't even _follow_ this shite. No idea how they were doing that.

But, then, she didn't really need to follow it. A quick thought and a flick of her wand was all she needed to cover the entire floor in a few inches of ice. Severus and Lestrange were immediately locked in place — along with anyone else still stupid enough to be in the room, but they were only in the way by this point. She paused only long enough to check where everyone was quick before stepping through shadows again, reappearing somewhere she had an angle so there was no one behind Lestrange.

She drew as much of her power as would obey her out from her centre, down her arm, mixing it with all the hatred she could summon. She fueled it with every memory she had of the Dursleys, every memory of the worst arseholes in Slytherin, every memory of the self-righteous, incompetent _fucks_ who had the shameless gall to criticise her for acting when they did nothing. Focusing that power and that fury on Lestrange, wishing with absolutely everything she had that Lestrange would just _die_ , that she would cease to exist, that nobody would ever have to see the insane, evil bitch again.

And, for the third time in her life, Ellie cast the Killing Curse.

Most Dark Arts, she honestly couldn't understand why they were illegal. There was no real justification for it. Some of them were dangerous, sure, but anyone with a drop of creativity could kill people easily with second-year charms. Far as she could tell, the whole "dark magic corruption" thing people talked about was a myth, it didn't really happen. There was no rational reason for most illegal magics to be banned.

At the least, though, she could understand why people had chosen to ban the Killing Curse. But for one simple reason, one people usually didn't talk about. As the familiar spell sprung from her wand, moving as something between fire and lightning, glowing a sharp, brilliant green, Ellie felt _good_. There was no other word for it. It felt _amazing_. All that rage, all that hatred, vanished in an instant, replaced with relief, with almost ecstatic _joy_. She'd successfully hit someone with it once before — it was possible she didn't take betrayal well — and the few moments after she'd felt simply the very best she ever, ever had. Fierce, wild pleasure crashing over her in an inexorable wave, almost like an intense orgasm but a hundred times better. (Not that she'd make that particular comparison with Daphne, she had _some_ tact.) Nothing compared, nothing at all.

So, she could understand why people would want to get rid of the thing. That didn't mean it wasn't just plain useful sometimes.

Unfortunately, Lestrange saw it coming soon enough, and leaned out of the way, the emerald fire falling against the floor some distance behind her, instantly sublimating the ice into hissing steam, charring a line of black into the stone. The next instant she released herself, popped away again.

Dammit.

And Severus and Lestrange were off again, popping around, the whole room vibrating with explosion after explosion, ice trailing up the walls before being blasted away again, the air filled with lightning and shadow and fire. Ellie tried to contribute, and she thought she did a little bit, maybe. Lestrange was just so fast! Clearly, she had a lot of work to do if she wanted to have any chance at all against Tom in the near future. At the very least, she didn't think she was making it harder on Severus at all. She could defend herself just fine, even if she wasn't doing any damage, good enough with shadow-walking or deflecting or shielding that she never got tagged, and she managed to stay out of the way. She just didn't feel she was helping very much.

And she wouldn't be able to not-help for very much longer. She was getting rather tired. And her wand arm was really starting to _hurt_.

It took maybe two seconds.

A long, thick strand of black and red was trailing from Lestrange's wand, whipping through the air all around her, lashing out at Severus and herself — mostly Severus, honestly. She knew this spell: on contact, it forced a large amount of kinetic energy into whatever it hit, crushing and cracking that which wouldn't move, sending unbound objects or people flying. A ring about three metres out from Lestrange was dense with cracks, shattered from intermittent strikes from the whip, the bench immediately next to her reduced to rubble and dust. This was rather easy to dodge, it moved slow enough it wasn't a problem, but the bitch kept dodging out of the way of anything she and Severus sent back at her, in a few cases slapping curses away with her bare hand. _God_ , couldn't this bitch _just d—_

And Lestrange suddenly vanished. Ellie had magical sensitivity enough to spot where she was almost immediately, a few metres behind her now. But the whip of dark magic was still there, floating in the air. A sustained spell, she knew it was. The moment Lestrange reappeared from shadows, the whip snapped into motion, racing with startling speed to rejoin her wand. There was just one problem with that.

Both she and Severus were in the way.

It happened far too fast, too unexpected for Ellie to react. Even as rock shook and shattered and screamed around her, a clash of discordant magic and a shout from Severus's direction, Ellie reflexively ducked away from the incoming magic, threw up an instinctive shield charm. The whip crashed down on the shield, pushing against it.

And the world around her was moving, the room sliding sideways in an incomprehensible blur, and then her leg was exploding with agony and as her knee hit _something_ , her vision going white and useless as she felt the scream clawing at her own throat, and the indistinct shapes she could see through the whiteness were tilting and spinning dizzily, she couldn't make any sense of it—

For a moment, an infinite moment that passed in a single breath, all was blackness, a blackness so dark the white pain was dimmed away, blackness pressing against her eyes, against every inch of her skin, clenching her damaged knee hard enough she wanted to scream, but the air wouldn't come, she couldn't move, all was tightness and nothingness and an indescribable sense of falling through everything, an occasional jolt vibrating against the steel holding her in place, as though striking against something in the blackness, one impact, another, another.

—and then her eyes were dazzled with blue sky and white clouds, her ears drowned with the sound of roaring wind, yanking almost painfully at her hair, very painfully at her left leg. And then green. And then blue.

Thoughts turned sluggish by the continuing throb in her leg, Ellie slowly realised she was outside, very high above the ground.

There was no way that was good.

With careful movements, trying to use her left leg as little as possible, Ellie slowly reoriented. She couldn't even say how she managed that, she didn't really think about it. Avian animaga instincts? She didn't know. But somehow, bit by bit, she stopped her dizzying tumble, ending with her body angled perpendicular to the ground, head tilted straight downward. Oh, good, she was still rather high up, the wash of green below still distant enough to be indistinct, mottled colours, the shapes of individual trees unnoticeable. Alright.

She took a short moment, wind pulling at her hair, roaring in her ears, stinging her watering eyes, to regather her breath, regather herself. This wasn't going to be easy.

Holding her arms tight against her body, Ellie cast off her human shell, traded hair and skin for feather and scale. She squeezed her eyes shut and grit her teeth as the transformation first touched her injured leg, her probable bone fracture turning the usually painless process agonising. But it only lasted as long as the transformation itself, going back to the dull throb from before, tucking her legs close to her body even ending the previous jerks and yanks. Ellie let the pressure in her beak ease, opened her eyes again, third eyelid immediately slamming closed against the wind.

Okay. Good. The deep green under her had turned a deeper green, a few places slightly more toward blueish-green, but she was used to that. And she could actually make out individual trees now — even individual _leaves_ , if she really looked closely — but she thought she still had plenty of time. Bird eyes were just weird like that.

The problem was speed. It only took a bit over ten seconds to reach more or less terminal velocity, by the time she'd been ready to change she'd already been falling seriously fucking fast. She'd noticed before opening her wings after high dives would pull at her shoulders like a bitch. But she'd never tried at these kinds of speeds, and she _really_ didn't want to accidentally dislocate anything.

Changing would have helped already: birds are rather less dense than humans, she had a lower terminal velocity like this, she should already be slowing down. But not enough. Carefully, moving only the slightest bit, she twitched at her tail — and if that hadn't been weird getting used to, didn't originally have useable muscles there — tilting the feathers somewhat above her head. She let the tearing wind pull her tail back straight, compensating with another push downward, the pressure slowing her slightly. And she did it again, and again, pushing a little further each time, nudging her speed down more and more.

When she thought that would do, she pushed up, and this time held steady against the wind yanking at her. The ground under her immediately tilted, her body canting around until she was held at roughly a forty-five degree angle to the ground. Which was good — she had a larger effective surface area this way, it'd slow her down further. The wind was tugging at her feathers a bit harder than before, fingers clawing painfully at her leg and yanking on her wings, she had to strain to keep them tight against her body. Over the next few seconds, the clawing weakened noticeably as she slowed. The wind still felt hard and violent against her, but...it didn't seem _that_ much worse than she'd had before. Maybe this would do.

It would have to do pretty soon. Those trees were starting to get worryingly close.

She tried to do it gradually, first loosening up her wrists, for lack of a better term, allowing the wind to meet the edges of her wings. Which was very nearly a stupid idea — the uneven force against her almost sent her spinning, that could have ended _very_ badly. She barely managed to balance again, and once she was stable decided, fuck it, and threw caution to the winds.

Ha. Sort of made her feel corny, but she found that almost funny.

She threw her arms wide, letting her wings take the full brunt of the wind pushing against her. And oh, _fuck_ , that _seriously hurt_ , dull, constant pressure pulling at her arms so hard she thought they might pop out of their sockets, she could almost _hear_ the muscles and tendons tear and strain against the force. But she just clenched her beak again, narrowed her eyes, and ignored it.

It might fucking _hurt_ , but it wasn't going to kill her. _Not_ doing it, on the other hand, most likely would.

It didn't take too long before she'd slowed down completely. Well, not _completely_ — she was still flying rather fast, the trees and bushes and grass below her flicking by with impressive speed, but it was a normal _I'm-flying-like-fucking-crazy_ fast, not a _holy-fucking-shite-this-is-bad-I'm-gonna-die_ fast. Almost moving entirely forward now, and not straight down, which was perfect.

And not even a sarcastic perfect. It was starting to occur to her just how close she'd come to dying just then, which was not a thought she was comfortable entertaining.

She brought her speed down gradually, mostly just letting herself glide the energy off, searching for a convenient break in the trees. She didn't want to try landing on a branch with a broken leg, no thanks. Finally she found a gap in the branches, tilted her wings to send herself arcing into it, spiralling down toward the ground, hard dirt interspersed with patches of grass and bushes. There, that spot would do, clear enough she wouldn't fall on anything.

Coming low to the ground, she backflapped a few times, and Ellie cast off her avian shell, grasping for the human one again. She grit her teeth as the change swept over her broken leg, somehow managing to hold the scream inside, even as her head filled with nauseating whiteness. One foot came to the ground, and she bled off the rest of her speed with a couple more hops. Doing her best not to jostle her leg too much, but still wincing every second or so as incandescent agony crawled up her spine, Ellie bent toward the ground, after far too long finally managing to lay herself out on the dirt.

And she simply lay there, trying to catch her breath.

What the _fuck_ just happened?

* * *

[there's no such thing as a fucking philosopher's stone] — _True. People do think there is, but there isn't. Long story._

 _Imperitāns — Latin participle of a verb meaning "command/rule", which is obviously imperius in canon. This isn't an incantation, by the way, just the name._

 _Austre furēns, terram inundā — Latin, something like "Raging Auster, drown the earth," Auster being the Roman god of the southerly wind. Rather powerful area-effect lightning magic. If it seems familiar, the same spell appeared in chapter 13 of TRW, though Ellie shortened the incantation significantly here._

Rḗtte (Ancient Greek: ῥῆττε) — _Imperative of verb meaning to tear, shatter, or break._

Pugiūmbrae ningite — _Latin, spliced together from "dagger", "shadow", and the second-person plural imperative of "to snow". The_ ningentēs _later on is the name of the spell, as a noun, instead of the incantation._

Saepem glaciālem profundam — _Latin, something like "thick icy fence" in the accusative, object of a dropped verb. I meant to put the quotation mark where I did, Ellie only said the last word out loud._

Cumfulmine lacerā — _Latin, something like "tear apart / destroy with lightning"_

Severus's limp and Ellie's guilt — _Don't know if this will ever come up again, might as well explain. Ellie's time at Hogwarts is somewhat different than canon!Harry. After Ellie and Severus avoiding each other in first year, they actually started talking in second year, and by third year were using each other's given names. By fourth year, it was common knowledge Ellie was Severus's favourite student, and he her favourite professor. Common enough Voldemort knew. Soon after his resurrection, he ordered Severus to bring Ellie to him at the earliest opportunity. He refused. He barely escaped with his life, and now has a permanent limp from a dark curse he was hit with. Had Ellie not fallen into the Veil, they would have eventually lost the war anyway — losing their spy in the Inner Circle would prove fatal. This is the same background of the Ellie in my time-travel fic, in fact, where they did lose._

[Lūx abluēns, ad fidēlēs tuōs dēscendās, et hanc suffōcantem noctem ablēgēs!] — _Latin, supposed to be "cleansing light, descend upon your faithful, and banish this suffocating night."_

* * *

 _Originally posted in "Back Burner" some time ago. For more notes, see chapter 2._


	2. 2

After a few moments, her breath gradually slowing, the agony radiating from her pounding knee screaming at the back of her head, Ellie grew to realise she had no fucking clue where she was.

Nowhere near where she'd been, that was for certain. It had been night a moment ago, she was certain of that, but by the position of the sun above her, it had to be...well, shortly before or after noon — she couldn't say which, not having her bearings. Which meant, at the very least, she'd been teleported somewhere _on the other side of the fucking planet_. Judging by the sharp, slightly wet heat on the air, the look of the trees ringing her little clearing that'd made her landing site, she'd guess... There were temperate forests in east Asia, right? That sounded like a thing that existed. Too far south in Asia wasn't likely, since it got rather obviously tropical down there, the foliage was all wrong for that, and it couldn't be too far west in Asia, since she was pretty sure that was all plains and mountains and deserts. That was her best guess.

And that was _at the very least_ , assuming she was still on Earth. She couldn't be sure of that. The way she'd been flung across the room, the odd...whatever that had been before she'd suddenly been thrown into the open air... She had a very distinct feeling Lestrange had accidentally tossed her through the Veil. Since this was clearly _not_ the afterlife, the Veil must not have much of anything to do with the realm of the dead, or whatever, but it had obviously brought her somewhere. She just had no fucking clue where.

While she thought about this, she slowly came to realise her bag, with all her practice constructs, was gone. So was her wand.

Also? She was completely naked.

Fuck.

Well, lying here doing nothing wasn't going to do her any good. All she could hear was the rustling of leaves in the wind, the twittering of birds all around, an occasional chitter from a squirrel or something. Point was, nature sounds, nothing man-made. It even smelled far too untamed — a dark, musty smell she associated with Herbology class, but far more powerful, hints of tang and sweetness that were probably herbs and flowers of some kind. A little bit of rot too, but the point was, there weren't even the slightest touches of contamination from either the muggle _or_ magical world. Which meant the nearest people had to be dozens of miles away, which meant nobody was likely to stumble across her out here in what was apparently the middle of nowhere.

Which meant she had to get up. Despite the fact that she was very sure her leg was broken.

Gritting her teeth, Ellie forced herself up to sitting, trying to move her injured leg as little as possible. A glance at her knee, and Ellie was cursing to herself under her breath — she sure as fuck wasn't walking on that. Her knee had gone red, a little larger than it should be. That she noticed a difference at all meant it would only get worse, since it had only been a few minutes since she'd taken the hit. She'd thought she'd been hit slightly above the knee, but by the way her knee was suddenly the wrong shape entirely, an odd jagged valley through the cap that _definitely_ shouldn't be there, she'd been a tad mistaken. Unless...

Starting halfway up her thigh, Ellie gave her leg a light poke, moved down a couple centimetres, and poked again. As she went lower and lower, an unconscious tension built, her leg shaking just slightly. Only enough to send further shocks of white-hot agony through the ravaged joint, that was quite annoying. After some pokes, she was getting near the bottom of her femur, already tender flesh protesting at the pressure. Another poke, and it was slightly worse, but the bone itself seemed fine. Another poke, still hurt, but not broken. Another poke, fine. Anoth—

Ellie sucked in a hard breath through her teeth, clamped down on her throat to stop herself from screaming. Her hands moved to clutch at her leg, but she caught the unconscious impulse before it could do any damage, instead flopped backward, fingers tangling into her hair. She waited long moments, breathing slow and harsh, for the increased fire in her leg to die down, for the pain to return to a more manageable level of terrible.

Once it had dropped to the point she didn't think she was in danger of crying out anymore, Ellie forced out a sigh. Yeah, okay. Looks like it wasn't just the kneecap, she might have done some damage to the lower bit of her femur as well. Awesome. That made getting herself back to civilisation way easier.

After allowing herself a few more moments to grumble at the terribleness of this fucking whatever was even going on, Ellie closed her eyes, forced past the pain to reach deep inside herself, drawing power through from without. She threw a summoning out into the air, more or less randomly — it didn't matter whether she tried to direct it or not, summoning charms were surprisingly flexible when it came down to it. It only took a second for—

Ellie frowned, turned her head to the left, looking for the source of that thumping and rustling. There was a branch over there, about the right length and thickness, but only on the very edge of the clearing, where it'd inexplicably stopped. Staring straight at the thing, Ellie cast another summoning charm. There was a slight delay before the branch, reluctantly, started moving. It made it to her, after a few moments, but _far_ slower than it should have, jerking forward in fits and starts, never even picking entirely up off the ground.

Once she had the branch in her hands, Ellie stared at the rough and twisted surface with a thoughtful frown. That was one of the very first charms she'd learned to cast wandlessly, but it was barely working. Maybe the pain was messing her up a little? That could happen, but she didn't think it should be _that_ bad. It wasn't like she couldn't think straight, and magic was basically just thinking...

Eh, not important right now. Her charms not cooperating wasn't that important, at least. If her runes were on the fritz too, she was going to have far more difficulty than she'd thought making a splint good enough to limp on, her leg as fucked up as it was.

* * *

When she got back to Britain, she was going to murder the fuck out of Lestrange. Forget how improbable it was she'd actually be able to pull that off, she'd figure something out, that bitch was so dead.

She'd flown for hours, further than she thought she'd ever flown at once before. She could cheat a bit gliding, so it wasn't like she'd been flapping like fucking crazy the entire time, but she was still exhausted, her arms shivering from exertion. And not that she was actually going _toward_ anywhere in particular. She'd decided to follow the sun, despite not knowing if it were morning or evening, or what was to the east or west of her anyway.

As the sun had fallen, she'd realised she was travelling west, not that it bloody well mattered. She couldn't even see anything to fly to up there, it was all trees trees trees, a rising and falling carpet of greenery as far as she could see.

Eventually, evening had come, so she'd decided she may as well sleep. Up a tree, of course — she had no idea if there were any animals around here she should be being wary of, but it seemed a reasonable precaution anyway. She'd searched out a tree with a spot where the branches grouped close enough, brought herself in for a slow, gentle landing, switching skins with her usual perfect timing.

And bumped her leg against a branch. Her vision had gone white again, the world fading out for a moment, she'd nearly fallen straight out of the tree.

Now Ellie was sitting reclined against the branches, trying to ignore how the bark pinched at her bare skin. With a rock she'd managed to summon after far too many attempts, she carved at the bark in the wood of her makeshift splint, sketching runes she'd picked up from healing spells. She was less than great with healing magic, but she'd paid enough attention in Arithmancy and Runes class to know which ones tended to be used in numbing spells and the like. She doubted it would actually do any good — healing magics only worked when applied directly — but perhaps there would be some bleedover. It was the best she could come up with at the moment.

She did remember how to brew Skelegrow, but even if she could find all the ingredients she couldn't do it without a wand. Those things were kind of handy.

Or, if her wand was a bit much to ask, some clothes would be nice. Fortunately, she'd managed to stay in the northern hemisphere, so it was still summer, and a warm summer at that. The temperature hadn't fallen with the sun as much as she might expect, either. So she wasn't freezing, but it was still just...uncomfortable. When she was a hawk, she had feathers, so it didn't matter, but she didn't think she'd be able to sleep with a broken leg in bird form. Thankfully, the splint came with her when she shifted, but that wasn't nearly good enough. No, she had to shift back if she wanted to sleep. Which meant she got to hang around, out in the open up a tree, completely naked.

It wasn't like there was anyone around, of course. But it still made her...uncomfortable. Which wasn't a surprise, really, another thing to blame on the Dursleys. It only took so many times being dragged out of the shower and thrown into a cupboard or told to take off your dress while your uncle found a belt to start feeling vaguely uncomfortable taking your clothes off, no matter the context. She shared a dorm with Tracey, and she'd never gotten used to, you know, changing and bathing and stuff, with her around. Even without her around. Luckily, Tracey was just as skittish about it as she was, at least in the beginning, but it was still awkward. Just, seriously, even screwing around with Daphne could be...complicated. Daphne was decent enough to try to be understanding about her, uh, _quirks_ , at least, but she didn't miss the odd looks she would give Ellie whenever she got up to track down some clothes before actually trying to get to sleep. Not to mention the actual sex part, that was always...well, she'd said complicated, that pretty much covered it.

It was getting easier for Tracey, she'd noticed, but Ellie had had a _serious_ relapse in the last year. Being kidnapped, tortured, and quite nearly raped could do that to a girl.

The point was, if being naked by herself in the goddamn shower made her uncomfortable, you could bet your ass being naked in the middle of nowhere up a bloody tree made her seriously fucking uncomfortable. She was trying not to think about the fact that she wasn't wearing anything, but it really was quite hard to ignore. The bark didn't help. She was trying not to move, because the shit kept scratching and pinching at her, it bloody _hurt_ , if she didn't get back to civilization soon she expected she'd be covered in scratches and scabs. And the bugs. Jesus bloody _Christ_ , the _bugs_. Just, just, _ew_. That's all she had to say about that. Ew.

She was going to be absolutely covered in mosquito bites when she finally got out of this damn forest. She just knew it.

And she'd gotten the rune crooked. Just great. It _really_ wasn't easy scratching a rune into smooth bark with a rock. It didn't help that it was bloody dark. Ellie squinted down at her splint for a moment, filling in the blanks in her head, trying to see if the rune was recoverable. She flopped back against the trunk with a sigh — and got scratches all across her shoulder blades for it, _ow_. She couldn't stop the sudden flash of frustration, threw the rock off through the trees with a harsh snarl. Stupid useless piece of shit.

She was still grumbling to herself when the clouds parted, silvery moonlight setting her surroundings into a wan glow. Of course, _of course_ the moon shows itself now. Where the hell were _you_ , she thought to herself, turning a glare upward, when she'd—

Her ridiculous rant trailed off as soon as she set eye on the moon. It was _broken_. Not completely, mind, most of it still seemed to be in one piece, but there were a few shards off to one side noticeably separated from the main body. Large pieces, they would have to be hundreds of miles long, the space between them, a flume stretching out into the darkness, filled with specks of scintillating dust, sparkling like glitter thrown into the air. That, okay, if someone had broken the moon, she was pretty sure she would have noticed...

Except... Except, that _wasn't_ the moon. After years at Hogwarts, she knew the surface of Cynthia, as magical astronomers tended to call it formally, as well as she knew the lines in the palm of her own hand. She could draw all the prominent maria and canals and craters with some detail, from memory. She would know. But not only was that moon fragmented, not only did it not have the correct features, it hardly seemed to have features at all. It was smooth and silver, glowing with a soft, even light, uniform in its color and brightness from rim to rim.

The realization came on slowly, like a few hesitant raindrops sliding down her face. She'd known she couldn't be in Britain anymore, but it was far worse than that. She wasn't even on Earth anymore. Unless there was another Veil of Death somewhere around here she could pitch herself through...

It was very possible Ellie would never go home.

As the reality of her situation seeped through, her first reaction was a pained wince. She just _knew_ Sirius was going to make a massive nuisance of himself.

* * *

Ellie stood on one foot, both hands braced against the tree, trying to convince herself to see reason.

But there was no talking herself out of it. Somehow, she'd gone completely insane overnight.

Getting to sleep had been difficult, for a whole host of reasons. And even when she had finally managed to ignore her discomfort forcefully enough to drift off, she hadn't managed to sleep all the way through the night. Though, she didn't remember what happened very well. She remembered fire and ice, her vision streaked with light and shadow, ears filled with the desperate gasping of her own lungs, the thundering of her heart, mouth and nose overwhelmed with the taste of copper and ozone. She remembered pain, as her magic raged and her body shivered, building and building, she remembered screaming, and eventually it'd become too much, and she'd passed out. It couldn't have lasted more than a few minutes.

She had absolutely no idea what had happened, but since she'd woken up she felt...different. She couldn't say exactly how. It felt rather like casting a spell, how the magic would work through bone and blood on the way to her wand — or just _out_ , if she was casting wandlessly — but _everywhere_ , not just through her chest and along one arm. And, well, that tended to hurt, and this didn't. There was the odd sense of fullness, as though something foreign had slipped itself into her very flesh, that familiar tingling, that irresistible giddy energy, energy that could never be fully consumed, no matter how much she might try to work it off. But it didn't hurt. It was just...there.

Which was, quite simply, impossible. There was a _reason_ overchanneling could hurt, there was a _reason_ going too far overboard could injure or even kill someone. Metals and crystals were far more resilient, but organic materials could only handle so much power before they just burst into flames. Even in wands, professional wandmakers had to treat the wood somehow. The burns Hermione had gotten in her amateur attempts had taken weeks to heal. Holding magic inside her body like this, lightly diffused through every inch of her like this just wasn't possible.

But, well, she wasn't on Earth anymore. It was possible her understanding of what was possible no longer applied.

One major thing she'd noticed, almost right away: her leg didn't hurt. Well, no, that was giving whatever had happened more credit than it deserved. It still hurt, of course, a low, hot pounding ache, but it didn't hurt _as badly_ as it had before. Poking at it made it worse, but...with her makeshift splint to support her...

With the thought in mind, Ellie had shifted, intending to go down to the forest floor and test it. But then shifting just had to go and feel _really fucking weird_. Normally, the process was a...a smooth one, she guessed was the word, a gradual transition from one skin to another, accompanied by a gentle... Much like sinking into a warm bath, it'd always felt to her.

But this time it was different. Like being struck with a harsh, cold wind, hitting not just her skin but slicing all the way through, the transformation taking with a sudden _snap_. It came as a bit of a shock, enough she'd teetered out of the tree, she'd barely caught herself before hitting the ground. She'd flown around a bit to find the nearest body of water, curious, but her reflection looked unchanged. Odd. Magic apparently _was_ different here — she didn't know why she'd been able to work by her old rules for her first few hours in this other world, but she was hardly an expert in interdimensional mechanics.

She wasn't even certain there was such a thing as an expert in interdimensional mechanics.

Anyway, she'd flown off to the base of the tree, snapped back into her human form. It was just as quick, sharp, and strange going the other way, though it didn't yank at her leg at all, thankfully. Putting herself here, completely naked in an alien world, leaning against a tree and cursing at herself.

Fuck it. What was the worst that could happen?

Slowly, Ellie tipped weight over to her broken leg, the ball of her foot touching, then her heel, slowly leaning further with every second. It was slightly awkward, her knee immobilized by her crudely-enchanted, wood-and-reed splint, and it _did_ hurt, sparks of spine-shivering pain shooting up with every extra gram. But the white agony didn't sweep away the world around her, her good knee might be shaking but she didn't collapse.

She brought one hand off the tree, lightly touched the skin over the break. (Or breaks, she suspected, it _did_ look pretty nasty, all mangled and misshapen.) Through her fingers, clear of the pain of the injury itself, she could feel her magic acting. Slow, yes, thin, but it was doing _something_. Her magic, having inexplicably spread itself through every vein and every nerve, was healing her. Slowly, _so_ slowly, but what else could that weak little spell be?

She hadn't even meant to cast it. She hadn't even known it was there until she'd touched it, felt it on her fingers.

Ellie smiled.

She stepped away from the tree, right steps confident, if somewhat shaky from weakness, the left awkward and stuttering. But she could stand on her left leg now, her improvised splint taking enough of the weight. As long as she didn't move her knee, anyway, she had no doubt that would fucking hurt.

It was a bit awkward though. Know what would be good? Another, longer stick to use as a cane. She wouldn't be able to take it with her when she shifted, of course, but she should see if that would be an improvement, at least. She reached for her magic, meaning to throw an undirected summoning charm into the air—

But nothing happened. Her magic didn't even move at her call, stubbornly remaining where it'd set up camp under her skin.

She frowned, glaring at the scattered greens and browns of the forest floor. She tried again. And again. She closed her eyes, hard enough she felt her nose scrunching up, focusing harder than she'd had to for months, reaching deep inside of herself, pulling, pulling, _pulling_...

But it wouldn't come. She couldn't do it. Her wandless magic was gone. That...

That was very bad. She was stuck, in an alien world she knew nothing about, with absolutely nothing, not even a single thing to wear, not her wand, _nothing_. And now her magic wasn't working.

She spent a few minutes, leaning half-collapsed against a tree, trying not to hyperventilate.

Okay. Okay. Don't panic. There had to be people in this world somewhere. Well, there didn't _have_ to be, but she was going to go ahead and assume there were. Why would the Department of Mysteries have a gate going to some other world if there weren't people in it? Uh, assuming they knew that's where it went, that is, and she had every reason to suspect they didn't. (The whole "Veil of Death" thing was evidence of that.) Don't think about that, that way lay only panic.

And, _some_ of her magic didn't work, but that didn't mean _all_ of it. This splint wouldn't hold together at all if her enchanting hadn't taken, certainly not well enough to bear her weight. And the materials were from _this_ world, so that couldn't be because her magic hadn't...caught up, or whatever had happened last night. And she was still an animaga. It felt very _weird_ , yes, but it still _worked_.

Did anything else work? She clearly couldn't cast magic outside of herself anymore but what about spells she didn't have to? Ellie picked a spot, in front of a tree a short distance away. With a long breath, in then out, she stepped into shadows.

This felt weird too. Her body turned suddenly weightless as the world froze around her, the chattering of the wind turning into a single, harsh note, the dancing of the leaves so slow they almost seemed painted in place. Then her vision streaked, trees and bushes and dirt slipping toward her, like the paint was still wet and someone had smeared their hand across it. Then, with another _snap_ —

The world came back far harder than she'd expected, and Ellie pitched forward, nearly fell before she snatched at the tree, hugged it to herself. She grit her teeth, waited for the sudden flare of pain from her knee to die down.

Okay. _That_ was weird.

She tried it a few more times, trying to adapt — if she got herself into some fix later down the road, it might be handy to have this shit figured out. And she did get the hang of it, after a dozen hops back and forth. The trick was to lean into it a little, then tip back as the world blurred around her, digging in her heel as she...landed, for lack of a better term. It was very awkward to pull off when she couldn't bend one of her knees, but it was doable. She wouldn't want to have to do it in a fight anytime soon, though. She'd probably hurt herself.

At least she knew. _That_ wouldn't have been fun to discover in the middle of a life-threatening situation.

* * *

She found the railway on the third day.

It was a huge structure of metal and brick, elevated a couple meters above the forest floor. Not only did it involve a lot of materials to make something this big, but Ellie felt magic thick on the air as she approached. Flying around the thing, checking under the rails and along the supports, she found a few dozen shapes glowing a faint blue-green, the power on them so thick she could taste it. Runes, obviously, though she didn't recognize the language. The rails themselves showed signs of wear, but not a hint of rust. They were still in use.

The scale of the construction and the enchantments were interesting, but they were far from the most important revelation. This had been built. It was still being maintained. There were people here, somewhere.

Of course there were. She hadn't doubted it for a second. Pfah.

After a brief moment of indecision, Ellie decided to follow the tracks toward the south-east. The winds always seemed to come from that general direction, and they were heavy with water, clouds coming in thick bands. She suspected there was an ocean that way, or at least a large lake. If there was going to be a city anywhere, it would be where the rail met the sea.

The next day, the forest beneath her changed. Not in a sharp line, but gradually, the two distinct ecosystems blurring together at the edges. All the leaves here came in brilliant reds and moody purples, she noticed, the land harsher and hillier, an occasional face of pale granite exposed to the air. The railway weaved between the low peaks, so she kept following it south, on and on and on, the constant carpet of green replaced with a fiery brilliance that nearly dazed her when the sun finally set.

That night was eerily quiet. She hadn't quite noticed just how loud all the bugs and frogs and birds and squirrels or whatever the fuck were until they were suddenly gone. It was a bit unnerving, but she managed to get to sleep all the same.

The next day, around noon, she came over a high wall of crumbling stone. The thing was old, she decided as she checked closer to the surface, rock slowly eroded away, eaten into by rain and root and moss. Far older than the railway, but where the tracks were clearly still in use, this wall just as clearly wasn't. Flying onward, she noticed a few shapes peeking over the treetops, blocky stone and angled steel, the skeleton of an ancient city long dead, abandoned and overgrown.

She tried not to let it get to her. The railway was still in use, she'd even been woken up by a passing train one morning. (She'd tried to catch up to it, but the thing was too bloody fast.) There had to be people somewhere.

And there were. Only a few hours later, she got her first explicit sign of living people.

Of course, her luck being what it was, it came in the form of piercing screams, faint with distance but unmistakable. Sighing to herself, she banked downward, following the commotion to the source.

A village, it turned out, built around one of the monolithic pillars supporting the elevated railway. Encircled with a high wall of stone topped with barbed wire, glowing runes etched across the entire surface, the village looked new enough. Modern, even. The little single-storey buildings were mostly made of stone, but she also saw metal and glass, electronic lighting, that right there at the base of one of the pillars even looked like a bloody huge television screen. There were a couple vehicles, big open-walled things complete with roll cages. A few people in gleaming muggle-style combat armor were even carrying rifles.

Which they were using to shoot at bloody monsters. Seriously, _monsters_. Big things made of shadow, spurs of chalk-white bone sticking out of roiling flesh, stitched with lines glowing red, the same color as their eyes. Really, they were _monsters_ , and they were bloody _glowing_. What the fuck _was_ this place? Ridiculous.

Awkwardly perching herself atop a streetlamp, Ellie watched the things pour through a breech in the wall, the soldiers and, by the look of it, a pack of civilians laying into them with a withering rain of firepower. Now that she was looking more carefully, those weren't ordinary guns: they weren't firing bullets. They almost seemed to be firing spellglows, splashing against the monster's exposed skeletons with flashes of diffused light, scoring through their black flesh like fire and lightning. Not too much of a surprise, she guessed, they did clearly have enchanting here. Maybe it was _all_ they could do — the magic of this world seemingly didn't allow the casting she was familiar with, maybe they were limited to artifacts and catalysts.

And here she'd spent all that time learning to enchant properly, too. Finally she got a lucky break.

Anyway, they seemed to be managing the assault well enough. Dozens of the things were dead, their riddled corpses evaporating into smokey clouds even as Ellie watched. (Which, okay...) The flood through the walls had reduced to a trickle, the defenders spreading out to hunt down the last few intruders.

She heard another scream from directly under her, far from the wall. Four of the things had managed to slip past. They looked...well, they rather looked like werewolves. Not _real_ werewolves, she meant the muggle monster movie version, hairy half-human things with clawed hands and an odd stubby snout. Though, these were made the same night black and gleaming white as the rest, glowing red here and there, their limbs long and skeletal, with more proper wolf-like heads filled with far too many fangs, their hands each with five claws as long as Ellie's forearm.

Oh, also, they were fucking _big_. Not huge, exactly, but big for a person, certainly. They'd be half again the height of a tall man standing. No werewolf was that big.

Surrounded by the four glowy-eyed monsters were people. A woman and two little kids. The kids were crying, cowering against their mother (probably), the woman holding them tight against her, cringing away from the monsters, yelling for help. Ellie glanced toward the soldiers toward the wall. They'd heard, a few had peeled off, were running this way. She looked down again, taking in the not-wolves stalking closer, looked up, measured the distance with their eyes. One of them, so close, snarled, and the little girl screamed.

 _Aw, fuck me._

Switching to her human skin, Ellie stepped through shadows, landing on the ground right next to the little family. She cried out as her still-broken leg took too much of the impact, the world swaying around her, but she shook it off. She reached for them, both arms spread wide, making sure she was touching all three of them at least a little. And she stepped back into shadows.

That delay at the beginning, when the world stretched around her, it lasted longer than usual, long enough to watch the monsters descend on them in slow motion, saliva dripping and claws lashing. But then, the ground stuttering under them unsteadily, they were gone, slipping out of the way as they moved—

The world came crashing back, far earlier than it should have. The four of them tumbled toward the ground, and a scream was pulled from Ellie's throat before she'd noticed anything was even wrong, vision blurring pale and blood on her tongue. Holy fucking _shit_ that _hurt_. Eyes watering, leg pounding, she pushed herself up to sitting anyway, looked back the way she was pretty sure they'd come.

And there the bloody things were. She hadn't gone nearly as far as she'd meant to, they were still right there, already turned and running toward them. They had seconds. A glance over her shoulder, and the beefy men with the big guns were still too far away.

Well, Hermione had called that one, hadn't she? Looked like her "saving people thing" really was going to get her killed. Daphne would be so disappointed.

She forced herself to her feet, ignoring the agony in her leg. If she was going to die, then goddammit she was going to do it on her feet. She glared at the bloody things, only a few seconds away now. With nothing better to do, Ellie turned, cocked a fist back, which was awkward to do, without being able to bend one of her knees. And she threw out a punch, pushing with everything she had, not just with muscle but with magic, calling for it on instinct, force of habit. The thing's claws came down toward her shoulder, her neck, and—

Skated off with an oddly metallic clang, the monster starting to stumble.

Ellie's fist landed an instant later. She hit it right between the eyes, just over the snout, right in the center of the bony plate over its face. All the great beast's momentum vanished in an instant. The hard shell of its skull cracked and, with a sharp hiss of lightning, shattered.

And the monster fell to the brick road at her feet, its head misshapen, bowing in at the front. It was dead. In an instant, just like that.

Ellie blinked. She stared at her knuckles, then at the not-werewolf at her feet.

Huh.

The screaming snapped her back to the moment. She whirled around, saw two of the things had slipped past her when she hadn't been watching. Moving before thinking, she stepped into shadows, reappeared right in front of one even as its claws started descending toward the woman's back. She didn't bother digging in her heel, just rammed into the thing shoulder-first before it could slash the woman to shreds, pushing it out of range. She hit the thing, her fist meeting the solid black muscle of its chest, but it didn't do as much damage as before, she hadn't been thinking about it as hard. It was still enough to send it stumbling back though. She spun again, the other one was too close, she wouldn't get there in time, she flung a hand out without thinking, she _pushed_ —

In the instant before it could strike, the not-werewolf was hammered with a sudden flash of white-purple lightning, taking it off its feet and flinging it back, flying through the air until it met the nearest wall. The stone cracked around it, and it fell down to the ground, frame bent and broken and crackling with electricity.

Magic danced in her veins, thick and hot and brilliant, Ellie felt she could sing. Instead she just laughed.

She was busy enough laughing she didn't see the last monster coming until it had already bowled her over. She crashed to the hard, stone street, the thing falling atop her, protruding spurs smashing into her, its weight suffocating. Her leg was suddenly afire, she'd felt the splint snap, but she didn't have time to worry about that. Its jaw had closed over her shoulder, its breath cold and rancid, razor pins jabbed hard into her naked flesh. But they didn't pierce through.

She'd figured it out. In the second after she'd watched the first one's skull shatter, she'd figured it out. The people here, they couldn't cast their magic out into the world. Instead they held it within themselves. There were no charms, but they could use their magic to heal themselves, to make themselves faster, stronger. It was the only explanation for how the thing's claws hadn't hurt her, how she'd punched it so hard its head had caved in. That's how magic worked here. She understood now.

While the magical knowledge she had might not do any good in this alien world, that didn't mean she didn't still have the power she'd been born with. And she'd been born with _a lot_ of power.

She reached for its head, fingers sliding over smooth armor and flesh so cold it made her hands ache, found its neck. Even as she squeezed, constricting the monster's throat with everything she had, it fought back, jaw working at her shoulder, claws slashing at her face, at her sides. But its teeth didn't puncture her skin, its claws danced over her without leaving a scratch. With each pass came an odd sense of shivering weakness, but Ellie cast it out of mind, squeezing, _squeezing_. Even when it jolted at her leg, the pain a fire that burned up to her hip and set her reeling, dizzy even while flat on her back, she ignored it, kept working at its neck, finding leverage, looking for the right—

With a hard jerk of both hands, the thing's head turned at an impossible angle, the breaking of bones so loud she clearly heard the series of pops. Ellie shoved the thing off her.

And hissed as her leg was wrenched again. Bad idea. Bad, bad, _bad_ idea.

Snarling. One more, that one she'd knocked over, she hadn't killed it. Ellie rolled onto her stomach, her knee screaming as it turned against the brick, her head swimming. It was close, looming over the woman and the kids, right there, she could make it. She shoved herself up with shaking hands, took one step, then a sec—

Ellie screamed, fell to her knees, then screamed louder. Broken leg. Right. Eyes filled with nothing but indistinct red and white shapes, ears with her own gasping and moaning, she dragged herself across the teetering stone. Just a little farther, _come on_ , she could make it. She pulled herself forward, flailed her hands out, pulled again, again, one more—

Her hands wrapped around writhing icy flesh, and she yanked back on it with everything she had, her magic obeying even as her body faltered. The monster struggled, it snarled, it howled, but Ellie held on, pulled herself up thick, furry legs, dragging herself up toward its torso. Its claws scraped over her again and again, each pass coming with a dizzying wave of weakness, but she ignored it, kept climbing.

Once she thought she might be high enough, she started hitting. Again and again and again, at anything she could reach, her hands going numb from the cold, and still she kept hitting. After a few seconds, they fell to the ground, her left side from toes to hip going limp and useless from molten agony, but she ignored it, just kept hitting the bloody thing. It fought back, viciously, claws and teeth, and she started to feel frightfully weak, her arms shaking, her head turning thick and slow, as though her skull had been stuffed with cotton, and she still kept hitting. Again, again, again—

One last slash from the not-werewolf, starting low on her side and slicing up her back, lines of fire that paled in comparison to her leg, she hardly even noticed.

At the same time, one last punch from Ellie, and she felt bone shatter under the impact, organs squish and blood splash. Abruptly, like flipping a switch, it stopped moving.

She fell to the side, numb from pain and exhaustion, she didn't really feel it. The last of her strength was leaving her, her vision fading to black and her hearing turning dim and echoing, she couldn't have moved if she'd wanted to. Not that she really felt like it at the moment. She'd done it in time, they were fine, she knew they were. She could just go ahead and pass out now.

The last thing she heard — faintly, as though from a room or two away — were the falling of heavy footsteps, voices barking indistinctly with crisp, military firmness.

Ellie snorted. Sure, _now_ they show up.

* * *

"It's her."

His fingers tightened against the plastic, his jaw clenched. "You're sure?"

"I am. The fight was caught on camera."

"And she nearly died, the way you tell it."

"She did, but I'm certain. Trust me. She's the last one. It's time to put things in motion. We can be ready by next year."

His mouth worked in silence for a moment, thoughts flicking behind his eyes too quickly to put words to them. "You still want to go through with it."

"I haven't lost faith." This said with a sense of pride, mixing with the eagerness he'd spoken with through this whole surreal conversation into something quite unlike him. Pompous, almost childish. "We're standing on the precipice of a new era, my friend. I'd love for you to be there, to see it all. You don't have to return right away, but in time for the Festival, at least."

"Yeah. Yeah, I'll do that."

"Everything will turn out just beautifully. Trust me. Don't I always follow through on my word?"

"Depending how you look at it. Look, this is great and all, but I have to go. You caught me in the middle of classes."

"Yes, of course. I wouldn't want to deprive your students any further. I'll see you then, old friend."

"Right." He ended the call, let his hand fall halfway to his waist. He stared at the screen, the image of the man there. The man he owed everything he was, everything he had. A man he'd once respected, a man he'd once loved.

He looked at him, and his stomach twitched with the beginnings of fear, raw and wild.

"Damn," Qrow muttered.

* * *

canals — _Here, Ellie is referring to a feature irl scientists call radial ejecta, debris thrown from an impact forming a starburst of long, straight lines. On the surface of the moon, they're particularly clear surrounding the Tycho crater, and to lesser extents Copernicus and Byrgius. The contrast is such magical-made telescopes should definitely pick them up._

* * *

 _Yes, I still exist._

 _I recently lost my job for medical reasons, so I've had more time to write lately. I've been too scatterbrained to focus on any particular one, but I thought I'd share what I do have for my poor, neglected readers. A few other fics were posted at the same time as this one. All of them will be updated randomly, as I finish chapters._

 _For this fic specifically, I'm currently roughly 3k words into the next chapter, which is...a little under half of it, I think. I've been distracted by Echoes and the untitled original fic the last few days, but I'll get back to it when I get back to it._

 _~Wings_


	3. 3

This was, hands down, the strangest room she'd ever been in.

Well, no, actually, she'd been to Luna's house. In the top five, then.

If you squinted and crossed your eyes, it looked like a perfectly ordinary hospital room. She hadn't even noticed anything off the first couple times she'd woken up. Of course, she'd been delirious from magical exhaustion and whatever they had been giving her for the pain, and hadn't exactly had the presence of mind to be making proper observations, so maybe that didn't count for anything. The first time she'd woken up and was actually _awake_ , though, it'd been pretty obvious there was nothing muggle about this place.

It was... _sort of_ familiar. The floor and the walls and the ceiling were that same sterile white muggle hospitals always seemed to be. There was the adjustable bed, a couple padded armchairs along a wall. That up there, hanging right in a corner with the ceiling, that was definitely a television. There was even this wheeled cart thing to the side, littered with little drawers and what had to be medical supplies and equipment, identifiable from the few relevant snatches of television she'd caught over the years. The chatter in the hallway outside, the occasional announcement over the intercom. At the very least, wherever she was was _similar enough_ to her idea of a hospital that it was recognizable as one.

Though, there was the weird stuff — and it was the familiar alongside the unfamiliar that made this place so surreal. She'd noticed the faint beeping of a heart monitor shortly after she'd woken up, it'd only taken a bit of glancing around to find it. Only, her vitals weren't displayed on a screen, as she'd expected. No, instead they were projected into the air, lines and numbers and little pictures made of red and green and blue light, just...floating there. Apparently, she must be in the future, because that _looked_ like a goddamn hologram. There was nothing there. She'd even passed her hand through it, just to be sure. It wasn't even connected to her with anything, she wasn't wired to anything at all, it must be getting all that by...well, some other way, how the hell should she know? It certainly looked like some sci-fi bullshit, that's as far as she got.

And then there was her leg. It was suspended a bit, her bed adjusted to half-sitting so her hip wasn't put at too awkward an angle. Her knee was obviously bent, hanging up there, but it didn't hurt. In fact, she couldn't feel much of anything from her leg at all. From calf to thigh, her left leg was wrapped in a thin layer of bandages, made of what seemed to be some sort of smooth cloth. All along their length, or at least every bit she could see, were runes. Well, she assumed they were runes, she didn't recognize the language. Drawn on with some kind of shimmery, glittery substance she also couldn't place. It was hard to see with the lights on, but when she'd been awake for a couple hours one night she'd noticed the runes glowed faintly blue. She couldn't feel anything at all anywhere the cloth covered, but she could still feel below them, even wiggle her toes, so she wasn't particularly concerned. Little metal rings just under her knee and just above her ankle were all that seemed to be holding her leg up, but they weren't connected to anything. Just...floating there.

Even the tele was weird. Because, while it was obvious that's what it was, it didn't look right. It was _far_ too thin, for one thing, she was pretty sure muggles couldn't make them like that.

Yeah, the whole thing was just fucking strange. Apparently the Veil was a gateway to magic Star Trek, who'd have thought.

She knew from talking to nurses, who came by now and again, that they apparently spoke English here. (Which was really quite absurd, when she thought about it.) But it had only taken a few seconds with the tele on a news station to confirm this wasn't her world at all. She recognized none of the places or people, despite the language the culture was familiarly unfamiliar. A map of the world had been shown at one point, curved to suggest it was the whole planet, and it was completely alien. She had no idea where she was, but it wasn't Earth.

She barely reacted. She'd already figured that out on her own.

Oh, and, apparently, those...things she'd fought, and nearly gotten herself killed by, were called Grimm. A bit on the nose, that.

She'd been _really_ awake for only a few hours before she started getting restless. She'd never done well with being stuck in one place. Or with hospitals, for that matter. And the rare nurse stopping by really weren't any good for conversation. They did have jobs, after all. Luckily, it wasn't even dinner time yet before she had a visitor.

Though, in retrospect, luck had had nothing to do with it.

The man was tall and thin, dressed in a sharp green suit that wouldn't look too out of place to muggle or mage. The cane wasn't _too_ peculiar, though the unnecessarily elaborate grip, bronze and silver carved into an array of interlocked gears, did deserve a second glance. He had shaggy pale hair, seeming neither quite blond not quite white, silver enough his unlined, narrow face gave an odd sense of agelessness — Ellie couldn't begin to guess how old he was supposed to be. Over round glasses, the lenses small and tinted, his eyes were a deep brown.

They danced as he looked upon her, their internal light unsettlingly familiar. She had no idea if it existed here, but Ellie prepared herself for a legilimency attack anyway.

"Ah, good, you're awake." The man closed the door behind him. He reached for a switch Ellie knew heavily tinted the long windows out into the hall, what they did in place of shades. Ellie tensed — before reaching the switch, his hand fell. "I'd gotten word you'd been in and out, they weren't sure you'd be up when I got here." The man walked to the nearer armchair, his cane clicking against the tile with every other step. By the way he walked, the cane was an affectation, he clearly didn't need it. He sat, setting his cane against the armrest, the thin blue binder he carried over his legs. And he smiled over at her, waiting.

For what, she had no bloody clue. She stared back for a moment, a long moment, but he didn't blink — not figuratively, and hardly even literally. She sighed. "And who the hell are you supposed to be?" The weakness still on her voice had the question coming out a little less properly confrontational than she might have hoped.

Which might be why he just smiled at her. Or he was just weird, she guessed that was possible. "I'm Director Ozpin, Chairman of the Executive Council of the Kingdom of Vale. I hold the seat as the Headmaster of Beacon Academy, where I used to teach history and languages. Also, I remain a licensed huntsman, though I haven't been out in the field for some years."

Ellie just stared at him. Jesus Christ, the head of the national government _and_ the headmaster of the school? She really shouldn't be surprised the first person she's actually speaking to here should be some kind of alternate reality Dumbledore.

After a moment of silence, smiling at her over his glasses, Ozpin said, "Might I know your name?"

For a moment, Ellie considered how she wanted to play this conversation. On the one hand, this man was already reminding her of Dumbledore. But that didn't necessary need to be a bad thing. There were many things that could be said about Dumbledore, but it was undeniable that he had power, and was willing to use it for his people. (When he could do so without weakening his own position, anyway.) This was a completely alien world here, she had nobody and nothing. This Ozpin guy was at least... _pretending_ to be friendly, she didn't know him well enough to be sure whether it was sincere or not. Or if faking that sort of thing was even a thing he did — Luna did suggest spending so much time around Slytherins was making her a little paranoid. There was no reason to not be accommodating, within reason. She didn't know anything about the government here, but his title back there made it _sound_ like he was some kind of head of state or something. Being on his good side could only be beneficial.

She'd be on the lookout for the knife in her back, though. Just in case he did that sort of thing.

But then there was the question of her name. She considered making something up for a second, then shrugged it off. She'd go out on a limb and assume nobody on this planet had ever heard of the Girl-Who-Lived. "Elizabeth Potter."

The smile vanished, his disturbingly brilliant eyes slowly blinking at her. "Elizabeth...Potter…" He said her name with a slow, intense emphasis, clearly confused.

Which was, itself, confusing. "Yeah? Honestly, it's not an unusual name, is it?" Though, with his name being _Ozpin_ …

"Well, I suppose that would depend. _Potter_ is an occupational surname, of course, although a rare one. _Lizabet_ is a very old given name, it hasn't been used in centuries. _Potter_ isn't in use anymore either, of course, not since before the War." He leaned forward in its seat, steepled fingers tapping at his chin. His eyes had gone even brighter, tight and unnervingly intense. "You are quite far from home, aren't you?"

Of course the locals couldn't use the same names she was familiar with. That would just be too convenient. "I guess I am."

"Well then, Miss Potter, if I may ask, how exactly did you come to be here?"

She wasn't sure if that was a safe question to answer. The thought of spending the rest of her life being prodded at by their equivalent of the Department of Mysteries didn't exactly appeal to her. "And where am I, exactly?"

"The National Medical Complex in Vale, the capital city of the eponymous Kingdom." His head tilted slightly, his hair falling over half his face, eyes narrowing. "I get the feeling the name isn't familiar to you."

Ellie shrugged. "I'm not from around here."

"I should say so. Unless I'm very much mistaken, I suspect you aren't from anywhere in Remnant at all."

"What's Remnant?"

Leaning back in his chair, Ozpin let out a low chuckle, smiling now, but his eyes still unswervingly set on hers. "You came through the Gate, didn't you."

It wasn't really a question. Still, despite that she perhaps should be...suspicious with how calmly he was taking this, she couldn't help feeling faintly relieved. They had a _name_ for it. (A name that wasn't as final-sounding as the Veil of Death, anyway.) Maybe she could go back.

Not that she was entirely sure she would _want_ to go back. Maybe just to bring a few people here with her. See, Earth was nice and all, but life there really left something to be desired.

But she answered his not-question with a question: "What's the Gate?"

"That's the question, isn't it?" Ozpin steepled his fingers under his chin again, still staring steadily back at her. Seriously, did this guy not have to blink at all? "Myths and legends tell of hidden worlds, just out of sight, worlds of magic and riches. Of gods and monsters. Old texts dating from millennia ago, before the Fall of the ancients to the first Grimm, speak of this other world as though it were a real place. They speak of, oh, all kinds of things. Diplomats, language, technology, literature, trade of all sorts going back and forth. Most experts on the ancient world agree this other world isn't just myth, it must truly exist.

"Of course…" Ozpin shrugged, his smile turning crooked with sadness. "...when the Grimm came, so much was lost. Our connection to this other world was through the Gates, structures of stone and silver. Once broken, the connection is gone. But, it is believed, the Gates on the _other_ side might still be functional. Every once in a while someone will stumble upon some exotic artifact or a corpse in peculiar dress, out in the wilderness. Some, myself included, have long suspected these are from that other world, things and people falling through their Gates. To my knowledge, no one has actually survived the journey since before the Fall." His eyebrows ticked up, the obvious question unasked.

That hope lasted all of thirty seconds. Ellie sighed, eyes tipping to the ceiling — it would give her a break from the man's unnervingly steady eye contact, at least. "So, there's no way back, then."

"I'm afraid not. The Gates were all destroyed long ago, and the technology to build them has been lost for centuries. Unless you are familiar with it from your side…"

"We don't know anything about it." She still wasn't looking, but she could feel Ozpin's eyes on her, bright and curious. She sighed. "We have the same legends, from all over the world. But, if the thing I fell through was one of these Gates, we've forgotten what it's for. The Veil of Death, we call it. Things go in, but they don't come out. People say it's a doorway into the afterlife. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this isn't hell."

There was a pause, long enough of one Ellie glanced toward her visitor. He was still sitting there, hardly seeming to breathe, hands still folded in his lap. The expression on his face had shifted somewhat, something distant and delicate Ellie couldn't read. But she didn't have to, his next question suggested what he was thinking rather well. "If your people believed this Veil was a death sentence, how did you come to go through it?"

She rolled her eyes. "Well, I didn't exactly _choose_ to, now, did I? There was a battle, I was thrown through by accident."

His face eased again, shifting into a wry sort of smile. "A battle? Forgive me, Miss Potter, but you seem a little young to be fighting a war."

Despite herself, she snorted out a laugh. "Not a war, really, just a few terrorists. And believe me, you're not the first person to tell me that. Maybe if everyone else weren't so shit at it I wouldn't have to."

He chuckled, low and soft, but thick with genuine amusement. Blinking, she just stared at him. That wasn't a reaction she would have expected. Most authority figures tended to get annoyed with her when she said that sort of thing. With a smile as unnaturally bright as his eyes, Ozpin said, "You fancy yourself some sort of warrior, then?"

"Well, no, not really." Ellie shrugged at the tinge of curiosity pushing up his eyebrows, shifted in place a little. Which was uncomfortable, pulled on the bandages across her back a little. (What was that from, anyway? She didn't remember being injured back there.) "I learned to defend myself because I so often have to. I mean, I was only even in that fight because I was kidnapped and brought there in the first place. It's just my luck I'm good at it, I'd be dead several times over by now if I weren't." It could be rather fun, actually, if she were being honest with herself. Not that she'd be admitting that out loud. People always gave her the weirdest looks when she said shit like that. "But, everyone expects me to become an Auror or a Hitwitch or something like that, and really, I'd much rather study to be an artificer."

An odd look flicked across Ozpin's face, but it passed too quickly for Ellie to figure it out, and he didn't voice whatever it was he was thinking. "I don't know any of those terms, I'm afraid."

Not too surprising — just because the language was the same over here didn't mean political and magical jargon would be too. Though, Ellie was all but certain magic worked differently enough over here there simply weren't direct equivalents, not the point. "Well, Hitwizards would be, ah, a more heavily-armed division of the police force, intended to bring in the more dangerous criminals. Yes?" Ozpin nodded, so apparently she'd managed to translate the concept well enough. "Okay. Aurors would be sort of similar, but with more of an investigative role. Aurors are actually _more_ highly qualified in combat magic, but fighting isn't all they do. It's a more complicated job. Artificers, though, they're more like…" Ellie suddenly remembered, Ozpin referred to his 'Gates' as _technology_ … "Um, basically, independent technicians focusing on research and development. Experimenting with new techniques, ah, refining applications of old ones. Selling their ideas and patents to other people who can produce or publish them, whichever is appropriate. If that makes sense."

"I believe I follow, yes. We have a similar profession here, though their numbers are very few."

Ellie wasn't surprised, on either count. They did seem to have enchanting here, or something much like it, so it would just make sense that there would be some equivalent. But no society needed _that_ many artificers — even back in Britain most were hobbyists, they didn't make enough to support themselves off it. Ellie wasn't worried about it herself, she had the Potter fortune to fall back on.

"But, excuse me, more than once now you've used the word _magic_."

She frowned. "Well, yeah. What do you call it?"

"There's no such thing as magic." He said it so evenly, so matter-of-factly, Ellie could do nothing but stare at him. After a second, he shrugged a little. "I mean, most everyone in the world _believes_ so. There are rumors, of course, and old legends, but I wouldn't give any credence to most of them. You should know anyone who saw what you did last week would find themselves doubting those beliefs, and you might find yourself buried under a deluge of uncomfortable questions."

"What are you talking about?" Ellie reached toward her knee, pointed at the runes on the wrap and the floating rings without actually touching them. "This is magic. I'm pretty sure those guns were magic. That railway had some pretty serious enchantments on it."

Ozpin cocked his head a little, one eyebrow ticking up. "It seems we may be having a conflict of terminology. Hard scripting, which if I understand correctly is what you mean by enchanting, is used quite a bit, though not so much as it used to be. Much of our technology is _powered_ with Dust, yes, but it is still just technology. Whatever you did to try to get those three people out of harm's way could be a Semblance. However, with very few exceptions, turning yourself into a bird and throwing lightning from your bare hand are not things other people can do. That sort of thing we call magic. And magic is vanished from Remnant, has been for a very long time."

"Ah." She tried not to wince — she'd been hoping nobody had noticed the animagus thing. Though, when she thought about it, that _did_ explain why someone as apparently important as this Ozpin bloke had decided to come himself. If she'd just been throwing around magic they believed was impossible, and he was a scholarly type, yeah, that made sense.

Wait. Wait a second. She'd _thrown lightning from her bare hand?_ She had, she remembered, she'd just sort of...reached out and done it. Hadn't really thought about it. But...she'd been under the impression her charms didn't work here. Huh.

But, anyway, conversation with alternate reality Dumbledore. Right. "Yeah, we call all that magic. There are different _kinds_ of magic, different casting methods, but they're all magic." Though, she had no idea what 'semblance' was supposed to mean. Foreign magic terminology, whatever. "If I understand correctly, you have some form of the graphic arts — enchanting, what you call scripting — and can draw up your own power to make yourself, your body, stronger and faster." She blinked, frowning. "Unless that's just me?"

Ozpin was smiling, thin and crooked. "No, it's not just you. Huntsmen and security forces are always trained in such techniques, and many private citizens learn to do it as well."

"Right," she said, nodding to herself. There was _one_ thing about her that was normal here, at least. She considered pointing out that _wasn't_ normal back home, actually, but decided against it. Besides, it was _technically_ something people could do, it was usually just achieved through charms and potions. It wasn't important enough to point out. "Anyway, yes, we have _magic_ too. Charms, we call it. There are all kinds of charms, thousands of them, meant for healing, or combat, or cleaning your bloody house, anything you can imagine. They don't work here though, I've tried. Er, mostly."

One of his eyebrows ticked up. "Mostly?"

"Yeah, I've tried some charms over the last few days, none of them worked. Though…" Frowning to herself, she unfolded her hands, lifted one in front of her chest. It was easy, just the smallest bit of focus, her magic leaping at her call, and white-blue sparks were jumping between her fingers. Lightning had always been easiest for her. It took a little more effort, her fingers tingling a little, but with a wave of her hand, Ozpin's hair flicking a little in a light breeze (his eyes and mouth both open wide), she conjured fog, a little cloud of it in front of her face, a squeeze of her hand contracting the water into droplets, flakes of snow she let drop to her bed, the heat melting them instantly.

She frowned, staring at the conjured water. That'd felt… Ellie reached for the table, plucked off her empty water cup. Another wave of her hand had the thing filled with chips of hail, she set it aside again. Normally elemental conjuring was temporary, but that water felt different, it felt _permanent_. She'd leave the cup there for a few days to confirm quick, but if it were she didn't have to worry about going thirsty ever.

"Huh, apparently elemental magic works." She should try some of the more complex elemental magics later, but experimenting with dark magic from another universe in front of alternate reality Dumbledore was probably a bad idea. Come to think of it, she _also_ hadn't tested runic casting yet — she was hardly an expert, but Severus had started her on it, and it could be very useful. But, if it did work, she'd rather hold that close to the chest, have at least one thing she could do Ozpin didn't know about. "But anyway, magic works differently here. It's more limited. It's even affecting my casting, which, I suspect that means it's something fundamental about your world, not your people biologically. If it were the latter, my magic would still work for me."

"Well reasoned." The awe had been stripped from his face, leaving behind that thin, gentle smile, eyes still lowly glimmering. "It is curious, now that I think on it. It is said magic is _lost_ from the world, not that it never existed — once, perhaps, our people were as magical as yours. Much has been lost." A sad yet ironic smirk twisting his face, "We are but a remnant of what once we were.

"But, let's cast those weighty matters aside for now. There is no way back to your world, so far as I know. With your knowledge of your world we _might_ be able to reopen the bridge, but I suspect that may take years of work, if it's possible at all."

Ellie snorted. "So, this is _not_ talking about weighty matters, is it?" Hell, it would be downright depressing, if she'd liked Britain much at all. And, hey, no Girl Who Lived nonsense here. Benefits. There were people she would rather have with her, true, but she could count them on one hand. She wouldn't have any fingers unused, but still one hand. She'd get over it.

His smile twisted into a smirk again, just for a second. "Well, so long as you will be stuck here, Miss Potter, I may be in a position to help you. I take it you were a student back in your world?"

"Yep. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry." At the disbelieving look on his face, she said, "No really, that's what it's called. It's stupid, I know."

"I suppose I would be foolish to expect ridiculous naming practices to be limited to a single world." Ozpin stared into the distance for a moment, visibly shrugged the thought off. "Anyway, as Headmaster, it would be a simple matter for me to arrange admission into Beacon for you. I'll have to falsify citizenship papers, of course, but it shouldn't be too onerous to get that settled. There are other educational institutions in Vale, but at Beacon I can ensure awkward questions remain unasked. It would be the safest option, I believe."

There it was. She'd been expecting that was the direction this conversation had been going ever since he'd said he had a school. Since she'd known it was coming, she already knew what she was going to do. "Maybe. What kind of school is it? What do you teach?"

Ozpin leaned back in his chair, hands steepling in front of him. "Beacon is one of four academies in the world operated by the Order of the Great Hunt." Ellie twitched with surprise at the use of that particular phrase; one of Ozpin's eyebrows ticked up, but he didn't ask after it. "They train huntsmen and huntresses, men and women sworn to protect all peoples from the creatures of Grimm."

"So, it's a military school of sorts."

"I wouldn't put it like that." An odd look crossed Ozpin's face for a second, something sour, but then he was smiling again. "Yes, all students are trained to fight — the Order boasts the greatest warriors in all of Remnant, in fact — and some field work is required to graduate. However," he said, one finger pointing straight up from its nest, "that is not all huntsmen do. Many find their talents are best applied elsewhere. Teachers, researchers, advisors to governments and corporations. So long as their work in some way benefits our fight against the Grimm, the Order supports our members in whatever they may choose to do.

"Ours is a noble calling but, yes, a difficult one. It is not easy by any means to live your life for the good of all. But we take care of each other. That is a good part of why I recommend you at least consider going to Beacon: while huntsmen may find they wish to seek supplemental income for other expenses, the Order ensures all their basic needs are met. It can be a refuge for people who have no family, no homes to go back to. And, given your previous studies in scripting and whatever of your world's magic you discover may be applicable here, you may come to be a great benefit to the Order, even if you choose not to fight the Grimm directly.

"Even should you decide down the road our life is not for you, I would implore you to at least try. For all that we can do for you, and for all the good you can do."

Ellie had to hold in the urge to smirk through the man's whole little pitch. How much he was playing up the _we take care of our own_ angle while playing down the _life of service for the benefit of mankind_ one probably shouldn't amuse her so much. Probably just because she had no one and nothing here, she didn't think he'd put together she didn't have a conscience yet.

Even with Hermione in another bloody dimension, she still heard the disbelieving scoff. Yes, imaginary-brain-Hermione, she realized she had a _saving people thing_ , as she insisted on putting it. But that wasn't what she was talking about. She meant, people suffering in the abstract didn't really bother her. She was perfectly willing to leave Britain and let Tommy-boy burn the place to the ground — had fully planned to once she could get her affairs in order, in fact. When someone, someone who _didn't_ deserve it, was about to be hurt or killed _right in front of her_ , though, and she could do something about it, she really couldn't help herself. She couldn't just stand there and watch it happen, something in her violently rebelled at that, she couldn't say why.

But doing nothing about faceless strangers somewhere else suffering and dying? That she hadn't a problem with. The Grimm could go ahead and slaughter their way through most of Remnant if they wanted, as long as it wasn't _right in front of her_ she didn't care. She found it hard to even pretend to care, honestly.

Anyway, this whole huntsmen thing was new information but, really, it didn't make that much of a difference. She'd figure out what to do with that later. Forcing her voice light, as casual as she could manage, she said, "Sure, why not. How do we get started?"

Ozpin smiled at her, that same gentle smile, so subtle it nearly seemed a natural feature of his face. But his eyes were brighter, a sharp twinkling Ellie found far too familiar for comfort.

* * *

"Excuse me, I– Are you Lily Black?"

Ellie glanced up from the magazine she'd been flipping through — some news and politics periodical, which had seemed smart, but she didn't know enough background to get what was going on anyway — to find a girl around her age awkwardly looming over her. "Oh, yes. Yes, that's me." She barely managed to not cringe. Smooth, Ellie. Very smooth.

When Ozpin had come back, two days after his first visit, they'd had a talk about what should be in the papers he was falsifying. Most of it he came up with himself, since she didn't know enough about the geography or culture of the region to contribute anything halfway reasonable, but she'd had some input on her name. Because people had weird naming conventions here, hers would sound very off to the natives. After briefly talking about it, Ellie had suggested Hazel Black — her middle name and her grandmother's maiden name had seemed simple enough. Ozpin had said that was fine, but somewhat hesitantly pointed out _Hazel_ was considered a masculine name. For some reason. But her mother's name worked just fine, so she'd borrowed that.

She could count on her fingers how many times people had used it so far. It still felt very strange.

But anyway, she'd been told to wait in the lobby once she was discharged, that Ozpin would send someone to pick her up — a fellow incoming freshman and her new combat tutor, in fact. (Apparently he was still trying to find a volunteer to catch her up on more academic subjects.) Ellie looked the girl up and down for a moment. She was tall, would have at least a head on Ellie if she were standing, lean and hard, her shorts and tee shirt revealing legs and arms visibly lined with muscle. She'd tied back her long hair, the stuff a vibrant red Ellie found almost uncomfortably familiar. Standing there, in the middle of the hospital lobby, she was shuffling from foot to foot a little, meeting Ellie's eyes only in flashes, glancing to the floor and back. Strangely shy, really, considering Ellie had been told she was some kind of duelling champion. Or whatever the equivalent was called here.

Ellie found her lips twitching into a smirk despite herself. "You'd be Pyrrha, then." She'd been told her tutor's name in that second meeting with Ozpin, had protested that _Pyrrha Nikos_ hardly fit in with the naming conventions he'd been describing either. But, apparently, Nikos was an old noble family in the area, they could get away with it.

The more she learned about Remnant, the more familiar it felt.

Pushing herself to her feet, idly straightening the uncomfortably thin little dress the hospital staff had tracked down for her, Ellie nodded toward the door. "We going, then?"

"Ah, yes." Pyrrha turned on her heel and led the way toward the towering main entrance, all glass and chrome, walking with a grace and confidence that didn't at all match the awkwardness on her voice.

Ellie had seen bits of the city already, of course, looking out windows. In a way, she'd been surprised both by how foreign and how familiar the place was. It didn't look _that_ much different from, say, downtown London. Buildings of brick and metal and glass towering over their heads, in this area of town none above ten stories or so but some in the distance reaching for the clouds, all gleaming in the sunlight with that familiar synthetic, modern sheen. There were road signs, and traffic signals, and crosswalks, cars and trucks and motorbikes zipping along, windows filled with advertisements and displays of clothes and food and various gizmos, only maybe half of which she could guess what they were for (which was normal, honestly, she hadn't kept up back at home either), a constant trickle of pedestrian traffic along the pavements, their clothing and manner familiar enough she could categorize them, formal-looking professional types focused ahead, packs of shoppers chattering on their slow way from place to place, young people with nothing better to do loitering at the tables on the pavement outside of cafés. It all seemed quite normal, really.

Most of it, anyway. Ellie had noticed the quality of the lighting in, well, _everything_ was a little strange, she assumed it was magical. (Not that the natives thought of it that way, still what it was.) A few of the cars were bloody _floating_ , some flying by well over their heads, shiny blots against the blue of the sky. The television screens she noticed here or there, through the windows of stores and restaurants and in a few cases displayed in the street, were impossibly thin, thinner than her hand, the image on them sharper than any she'd seen back on Earth. One tech store even had a _window_ that seemed more television than glass — a looped animation advertising some new product, lines sharp and colors vibrant, but still partially transparent, the store beyond tinted. There wasn't any flickering in the air from a projector, so it had to be a display screen of some kind, but she hadn't known that was possible. She didn't let the weirdness of it bother her, she just brushed it off by calling Remnant _fantasy Star Trek_ in her head.

Oh, and, not everyone was human. Faunus, she'd learned they were called — she wondered if the connection to the ancient Roman god was a coincidence or not, but it wasn't really important. They were, to put it briefly, anthropomorphized animals, exactly how human they looked varying from one to the next. There were usually ears and tails, all covered in fur and bloody obvious, peculiar horns sticking out of their hair in a few cases, but some of them were far more obvious. Longer, narrower heads, fur covering arms or even faces, clawed hands, bone structure altered enough to give them an awkward, loping gait. She'd thought them rather peculiar at first glance but, well, she'd already gotten used to goblins and veela and elves and shite like that. It hadn't taken her long to get over it.

They'd been walking for a couple blocks already when Pyrrha jumped, said she'd forgotten, she'd been given a scroll for her. A scroll, it turned out, was this little magical device people here apparently used for just about everything. It started as this tiny little thing of metal and plastic, as wide as and a little longer than her middle three fingers put together. Press a little release in the middle, though, and it split down the middle, pulling apart to unroll a paper-thin display screen. Pyrrha poked around the thing, showing her how to access everything from her I.D. (people here didn't use physical cards for some reason) to a bank account she'd been given access to (or hard currency, apparently), what sounded like the equivalent of a telephone _and_ the bloody post, maps of the city, a couple things involving something Pyrrha called "the net", which was far too complex of a concept for Ellie to get her head around all at once. At that point Ellie stopped her, that was enough to be getting on with already.

Of course, this damn dress Ellie had been given didn't have pockets. She folded the scroll closed again, wedged the thing in the strap in front of her shoulder as well as she could. "So, some money has been set aside for me."

"Oh, yes. It's not very much I'm afraid." Pyrrha's voice always came out oddly slow and stilted, as though she were carefully considering every word that came out of her mouth, and then going over it again just in case. It made an odd contrast against how she looked and how she moved, Ellie still wasn't sure what to think about that.

"More than I expected, honestly." Ellie wasn't used to being, just, _given_ things. Outside of the Potter estate just falling into her lap, anyway, and Sirius being Sirius. Even that was still weird to think about, sometimes. "Is there enough on here to buy myself some clothes? I sort of have, you know, nothing." She had absolutely no idea how much a lien was worth, after all.

"Oh! Yes, of course. Give me a second." Pyrrha pulled out her own scroll, fiddled around a bit before leading Ellie off down a side street, presumably toward a store of some kind.

It was a little curious, how Pyrrha had immediately accepted the _I have absolutely nothing to my name_ thing. Not to mention how ignorant Ellie knew she was when it came to, well, everything about this place. She had to wonder exactly what Ozpin had told her to explain all that.

Ellie was a little surprised by how small and moodily-lit the place Pyrrha brought her to was — honestly, she'd been expecting a huge, eye-watering department store of some kind. It wasn't the nicest place, there was dust in a few places and scuffs on the floor, but Ellie's obscene wealth had been mostly theoretical, she only cared so much as it suggested she wouldn't be bankrupting herself. Picking through the shelves and the racks was a little complicated, since she didn't know how the sizes worked here, but that's what changing rooms existed for. She didn't pay that much attention to what she was getting, aiming for jeans (which existed here, apparently) and shorts and shirts in darker colors.

It was rather warmer here than back home, she'd get uncomfortable if she covered up as much as she was used to. Which would itself be uncomfortable, but she'd just have to deal with it. After paying for her shit, she went back to the changing room to switch into a tee shirt and a pair of shorts she'd just bought, walking back onto the street immediately getting her feeling a bit twitchy. She was covering up more than Pyrrha was — her shorts barely even made it to her thighs, McGonagall would have a fucking heart attack — but not really by all that much. She didn't think she'd worn anything this...little in public in her life ever. (Well, unless you count that time she'd dropped from the sky completely naked, but she hadn't had room to think about that at the time.) And the shirt didn't go quite as far past her waist as she'd thought it did, she kept reaching to yank at the hem. She tried to not feel too self-conscious, but it was bloody impossible, her skin crawled whenever she noticed anyone looking even in her general direction.

She never thought she would miss robes, but there it was.

They had two more places to stop quick, since Ellie was still short underthings and shoes that actually fit. The former Ellie was in and out of as quick as humanly possible, and the latter she dithered a bit before picking out boots that felt sturdy enough to hopefully last for a while. Finally, Ellie's minimal new wardrobe split between them, Pyrrha started leading her off toward Beacon again.

Before long they came to a slow-flowing river, maybe a hundred yards wide, the length in both directions lined with docks and boardwalks and greens, spindly little ships with colorful sails flitting across the water. "The easiest way to get to Beacon from the city is by river," Pyrrha was saying. She pointed ahead, toward a ship moored against the boardwalk, a sizeable double-decker thing in Slytherin green and silver. "There's a stop every half mile or so. Green ferries go upriver, blue ferries go down, and white ones go across; they come by about every fifteen minutes during the day, and closer to an hour at night. We need to go upriver. Come on, we can still catch this one."

They half-ran toward the ferry, her bags jerking uncomfortably in her grip. If she hadn't already figured out how magic worked around here, that she could will her magic to make herself faster and stronger, she probably would have fallen behind or dropped something. They clanked up the ramp, found a spot to stand along the railing. Ellie dropped her bags on the floor, took a moment to rub at her aching wrists — that hadn't taken very long, fucking things.

The ship kicked into motion, quickly enough Ellie almost fell over backward. Gripping the rail, she took a few calming breaths, glaring down at the churning surface a few feet below her. Nothing accelerated like this on water. The bloody boat must be magic too.

They stuttered their way up the river, stopping again and again, waiting for people to stomp their way on and off. Ellie spent most of it just staring out at the city, a city stretching for miles and miles, distracting herself from her boredom with her own thoughts. This wasn't a small place by any means, from the impression she'd gotten so far it had to be the size of London, at least. How far away had she been when she'd gotten wrapped up in that Grimm attack? It couldn't have been _that_ far. But, the countryside she'd seen had been completely abandoned. That...didn't seem possible. How the hell could a city this size support itself without outlying infrastructure? Like, farms and shit. Now that she thought about it, it was really weird.

Maybe they did everything they needed within the city itself. With prodigious application of magic, or whatever they wanted to call it, she was sure that was possible. Hell, they could probably put their farms underground if they wanted to. Given how big of a problem Grimm apparently were, yeah, it'd likely be worth the effort to figure out how to do that sort of thing. Seemed likely.

A cliff gradually rose out of the horizon ahead, hair-thin filaments of metal glimmering at the top. As the ferry drifted its way inland, the gleam slowly resolved into a massive complex of curving towers, connected with arching bridges, separated with blocky brick buildings and open courtyards. At least, Ellie assumed those gaps had to be open space of some kind, the cliffs had to be over a hundred meters high, she couldn't make it out. The shorter buildings quickly disappeared behind dark, quartz-studded granite, the towers following them one by one, until they finally passed into shadow, the sun along with half the sky disappearing behind a wall of stone.

They disembarked at a sizeable harbor at the base of the cliffs, surrounded by barges crawling with dock workers unloading cargo by the crate. Pyrrha led her through the noise, toward a wide staircase of stone and plastic, the rail marked here and there with faintly glowing crystals in green and purple, switchbacking its way up the side of the mountain.

Ellie nearly groaned at the length of the ascent, before realization hit her so hard she nearly stopped mid-pace. It was easy here to use magic to enhance oneself physically. Back on Earth, climbing a ridiculously long staircase like this would probably wipe her out, but it shouldn't be a problem now. Pyrrha had them going up at a steady trot, and Ellie had no difficulty at all keeping up. By the time the successive shelves that made the stairway had completely blocked the pier below them, the exertion was pulling at her chest a little, her calves just settling into a tingling burn even with her magic thrumming through her, but it wasn't that bad.

They were climbing for some uncounted minutes when Pyrrha slowed, coming to a halt at the next landing. "We can rest here for a moment, if you like. Professor Ozpin did say you only unlocked your aura recently."

Ellie considered the suggestion for a moment — she wasn't exhausted, but she was breathing harder and her knees were starting to complain at her. "Sure." She moved to one of the benches along the rim of the landing ahead of her guide, shakily sinking to a seat. Her legs flared as she took her weight off them, her breath coming out in a shudder. Okay, maybe the climb was affecting her more than she'd thought.

Too bad she couldn't just fly to the top. Ozpin had told her she should avoid letting people know about the turning-into-a-bird thing. Local superstition, apparently.

Leaning over to rub at her burning calves, she glanced up at Pyrrha. The girl seemed perfectly at ease, standing there with her hands on her hips, breath even and not a hint of sweat anywhere, not even flushed a little with the effort. (And with how brief her shorts were and how deep the neck of her shirt, Ellie would be able to see it.) That was just annoying. Mostly to distract herself, she asked, "What the hell is aura?"

Pyrrha blinked at her, round face a blank sort of shock. "You've been using your aura the whole way here. I can feel it."

"Oh, right, of course." They called a person's magic _aura_ here. Okay. "Ozpin might have downplayed my experience somewhat. Though, I haven't been properly educated in this stuff. Where I come from we call it magic, we don't think about it the same way." It seemed safe to admit that, she figured there must be isolated communities with all kinds of superstitions about "aura", just as there were with magic back on Earth. Just human nature. "I've done a lot of scripting, but this physical stuff is mostly new to me. Hardly knew I could do it at all until I had a run-in with a few beowolves."

"Goodness. Was that why you were in the hospital?"

"Well, partially." Technically, she'd broken her leg in a world beowolves didn't even exist, but fine. "It's how Ozpin found me too. Apparently, people don't normally beat the shit out of the things with their bare hands."

Pyrrha's eyes widened for a moment, then narrowed with the slightest frown, her head tilted slightly, looking Ellie up and down. (Which was making her skin itch, she tried to not notice.) If she had to guess, Pyrrha had pegged her as a helpless amateur, was now reevaluating her opinion of her. "Killing any Grimm without even a weapon is quite impressive. Most would have to rely on their Semblance, if they could manage it at all."

She failed to hold in a disdainful snort — it hadn't been that hard, really. Scary as hell at first, she'd been positive she was about to die, but those things weren't nearly sturdy enough to resist magically-augmented beating the shit out of them. If she hadn't had a bloody broken leg it would have been a walk in the park.

Blinking to herself, Ellie straightened in her seat a little, looking up the next flight of stairs. _Semblance_ , Pyrrha said. Ellie still didn't know what that was, exactly. But she remembered, back during their first meeting, Ozpin had said shadow-walking could be explained away as one.

If that were true, she had a _much_ better way to get to the top of these bloody cliffs than climbing them one by one like some kind of sucker.

She pushed herself to her feet, wincing at the hot stiffness in her legs. "You know, fuck this walking thing."

Pyrrha blinked at her. "I'm sorry?"

Her lips pulling into a grin, Ellie wiggled her fingers in a little wave. Leaning into it as she remembered she had to do now, she stepped into shadows, the cliffside blurring around her for an instant before zipping past. Reality snapped back into cohesion at the next landing, and she fell the last foot or so, stumbling a little — with the angle the stairs made, she couldn't actually _see_ the next landing from the one under it, her aim wasn't perfect. The momentum from her damn shopping bags wasn't helping either. Smirking, Ellie turned back down the stairs.

To find Pyrrha was already most of the way to her, bounding up the stairs four or five at a time, moving faster than Ellie would think possible. Looked more like a bloody deer than a person, it was ridiculous. In another second she was sliding to a halt in front of Ellie, giving her a wide-eyed look of surprise. Bitch still wasn't showing a single sign of exertion. Absurd endurance, really, but Ellie guessed that was magic for you. "That _is_ a useful Semblance." Her lips started curving, a shadow of a shy smile. "Not fast enough, though." And then she was gone, disappearing around the curve of the landing, moving up the stairs so fast she was practically a blur.

Oh shit, were they competing now? Alright, then. Ellie leaned through shadows again, passing by Pyrrha, the sight of her slipping by stretched and distorted, near the top of the next flight. She stumbled on landing again, turned even as Pyrrha whipped past her, and then she was moving again, pulling ahead again. When she popped out in mid air, she turned, pushed herself into shadows immediately after her foot hit the tile, but it left her slightly unbalanced, she nearly fell over at the next landing, wasting a couple seconds before she could find her feet, lean into the next one.

Halfway up this flight, she caught a red and white blur appearing over the rail on her right. Turning around at the next landing, she saw Pyrrha already ahead of her. She'd _somehow_ found the time to tie her share of Ellie's bags to her waist somehow, what the hell. Even as Ellie's eyes found her, she planted her feet, then jumped, _she jumped twenty feet into the air_ , her hand finding the lip halfway up the next flight of stairs, a kick against the craggy granite of the cliff sending her flipping over the rail, and she was gone.

That… That was just bloody _cheating_.

But, well, Ellie could cheat too.

She backed away from the cliff face, until she felt the railing butt against her shoulders. Craning her neck back, she spotted the peak of the cliff. It was hard to tell for sure from this angle, but that bit of railing way up there looked level, had to be it. Without thinking twice about how completely stupid of an idea this was, Ellie stepped through shadows.

Straight up.

One landing after another flickered by in an indistinguishable smear, the wards a warbling roar in her ears, only for a couple seconds before she was popping back out again. The wind hit her in a sudden, solid blow, the breeze off the sea turned harsh and chaotic — the stairs must be warded against it, she hadn't noticed any wind at all before — but she ignored it, looked down to the peak of the cliff. Some feet below her now, a high railing, a little tiled courtyard, an open-sided, wooden building with chairs and benches and what looked suspiciously like vending machines. She forcefully dug her magic into the air around her, yanked herself into shadows.

She hit the ground hard, smashing first a knee and then a shoulder against the tile, her momentum bringing her rolling for a few feet until she fetched to a halt against one of the pillars holding the roof up. Coughing, she rolled onto her back, rubbing at her side, her ribs where she'd run into the damn thing. It smarted rather badly, but she could already feel her magic at work, the pain slowly decreasing second by second. Her knee and shoulder, the little scrapes she'd gotten flailing around like an idiot, they were already healing themselves too. She reached for one of her bags, shakily shoveling back inside knickers and bras and vests that had gone spilling everywhere, trying to ignore the heat on her own face. "Yeah, that was a brilliant idea. Good show, Ellie."

Pushing herself to her feet, she took a quick glance around, finding the area strangely empty. Good, nobody had seen her make an idiot of herself. That would have been embarrassing.

Eventually, Pyrrha finally caught up — to be fair, it was probably only a half minute later, far faster than Ellie could have done following the stairs. Flipping over the edge of the cliff feet first like a bloody gymnast, because of course she did. By then, Ellie was leaning against the same pillar she'd tumbled into, her bags all neat and tidy at her feet, hands in her pockets and a cocky smirk on her face. "Too bad, I win. Maybe next time, Nikos."

She was a little concerned Pyrrha would find the taunt annoying. She didn't know her yet, after all. It'd probably be better to _not_ make Pyrrha hate her, they would be spending a significant amount of time together over the next weeks, being her tutor and all. As well as literally the only person around her age she knew in the universe.

But Pyrrha laughed, the sound high and bright, shaking her head to herself with a sparkling smile. "Maybe next time."

* * *

Faunus descriptions — _I've altered some stuff about faunus just in general. The tendency to give races like the faunus in various media very human-like appearances annoys me sometimes. I assume it's done to keep them pretty and sympathetic, but I really don't think it's necessary. Some people look far more human-like than others, and there are reasons for this, it'll be explained eventually._

[A scroll...little magical device] — _Ellie is from a time before smartphones, she wouldn't think to make the comparison._


End file.
